Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  As early as March 14, memos flew between Selznick and MGM regarding the director’s credit. Matters heated up in October when MGM insisted that Fleming’s name had to be placed on the last title card, following the cast of characters and immediately preceding the picture, according to the latest pact between the producers and the Directors Guild. Selznick ignored that rule, because his deal with Fleming predated the guild contract.

  Throughout the autumn, Fleming assisted in the editing, and in October and November, he filmed numerous insert shots, additions, and retakes. Greg Giese, seen in close-ups of both Beau and Bonnie Blue as infants, learned from his mother that after the first preview on September 9 in Riverside, California, Selznick decided “the babies they’d used just didn’t look newborn.” Fleming shared that perfectionism—and instinct for emotional reality—and oversaw fresh baby shots featuring Giese.

  During this period, Selznick made the disastrous suggestion to Fleming that the credits should thank the directors who received no official titles on the film. He got no further than Cukor and Wood before Fleming interrupted and told him he didn’t think it was necessary. Then he huffed off to remake the night scene of Scarlett, Prissy, and Melanie and her baby hiding from Yankee soldiers in a swampy creek under a bridge during a thunderstorm.

  Real rain began to fall. Fleming believed that the scene would be impossible to light. Klune disagreed, and Fleming (in Klune’s recollection) snapped, “You do whatever these Jews want you to do, don’t you?” This outburst has fostered Fleming’s reputation as an anti-Semite. But there’s an air of roughhouse workplace comedy to the gibe, more along the lines of anti-bossism than anti-Semitism. Only under Selznick’s obsessive hammering is Fleming known to have uttered an ethnic remark on a set. The Paramount executive Sam Jaffe contended that Fleming was anti-Semitic when he knew him in the 1920s but, as evidence, cited one instance of Fleming imitating his Jewish Harlem accent before falling back on hearing the director call Selznick “that goddamned Jew” during the making of Gone With the Wind.

  America’s ethnic badinage before World War II was coarse and unabashed, but Fleming appears to have kept it out of his workplace almost all the time. George Sidney, who shot screen tests at MGM before becoming a successful director himself (Annie Get Your Gun, Scaramouche), knew Fleming well, and recalled, “I’m half-Catholic, half-Jewish—Irish-Hungarian—and I never got an anti-Semitic feeling from him. You have to be small to have that kind of feeling, and he was bigger than that kind of thing.”

  While Selznick was juggling credits and vanity (including his own), he was also battling censors to retain the most famous exit line in the history of motion pictures: Rhett brushing off a now-repentant Scarlett with “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!” (Minus the “frankly,” he has the same line in the novel.) Fleming had shot that scene twice—first, as a backup, with the weak “I don’t care.” The prospect of that substitution could not have pleased him any more than Selznick.

  It wasn’t the only “damn” spoken in the picture, but it was the only one heard. Under Fleming’s direction (and, for a retake, Wood’s), Frank Coghlan Jr. played the young soldier who collapses in Rhett’s face during the retreat from Atlanta. Coghlan wrote that when the scene continues and another soldier tries to pick him up, he responds, “Put me down, damn ya, I can walk”—and that the cussing was audible when he first saw the film that winter in Los Angeles. Coghlan thinks that Selznick expunged the line, believing his “damn” undercut Rhett’s. If you watch for Coghlan’s bit in the current prints of the movie, his mouth does move visibly but without a sound, and the camera cuts away.

  Selznick won the censorship war based on Rhett’s “damn,” not Coghlan’s. He compelled the Motion Picture Association board to amend the Production Code. “Damn” and “hell” could now be used when they were “essential and required for portrayal, in proper historical context, of any scene or dialogue based on historical fact or folklore, or for the presentation in proper literary context of a Biblical, or other religious quotation, or a quotation from a literary work provided that no such use should be permitted which is intrinsically objectionable or offends good taste.”

  In 1940, Leigh toted up Scarlett’s flaws and virtues with conciseness and lucidity. On the negative side: humorlessness, pettiness, and “selfish egotism.” On the positive side: “Her courage. She had more than I’ll ever have.” Leigh saw through Scarlett and identified with her: “While Scarlett wasn’t the most easygoing type, neither am I.” Just weeks before Leigh’s death, the actress declared, “I never liked Scarlett”; maybe that’s why she doesn’t sentimentalize her. Seconds after Rhett walks out on Scarlett, this indomitable dame returns to form and lets the thought of Tara cheer her up: “I’ll go home, and I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day!” Writing in Esquire in 1961, the skeptical Dwight Macdonald praised the movie’s pace and tough-mindedness. Preferring it to a couple of Tennessee Williams misfires, Macdonald observed, “At least there is some doubt as to whether the heroine is a bitch—or as to whether the heroine is only a bitch. That makes it more interesting, more grown-up. Adult entertainment, that’s what I like about Gone With the Wind.”

  The invitation to the wrap party listed Selznick as Jonas Wilkerson and Fleming as Big Sam. If you summon the proper context for the joke, with Selznick at the height of his prestige and Gone With the Wind as his make-or-break project, the gag takes on a starry glow. (At the party, Leigh presented Fleming with a pair of budgies for his daughters. He thanked her with a kiss that showed he was someone who knew how.)

  Unfortunately, the fault lines soon cracked into a full-fledged rift. Fleming suggested giving Wood and Cukor a special thanks in the official program, only to see this sentence in the finished playbill: “There were five directors on Gone With the Wind, all personally supervised by David O. Selznick.” Fleming wrongly blamed Selznick for this insult instead of the writer, MGM publicity maestro Howard Dietz. Words flew between MGM and Selznick over the affront, with Selznick proclaiming his respect and affection for Fleming, who did receive sole directing credit on the screen.

  Even so, the press allotting Selznick major praise for the success of the first sound-era blockbuster spurred discussion in the ranks of the Directors Guild. In a lengthy missive to Guild president Frank Capra (who, Selznick said, had badly wanted to direct Gone With the Wind himself ), Selznick wrote that he didn’t “mean in any way to detract from the brilliant job that Victor did.” Yet he then went on to itemize the contributions of Menzies, Cukor, and Wood. And in a highly unlikely notion of events, he protested that after the program dustup, he and Fleming “threw our arms around each other and decided not to let any outsiders spoil a long and warm friendship; and I thought that was the end of it, until some others took the matter up and decided to make it their issue, even when it was obviously of no interest to Victor.”

  Selznick quotes Fleming telling MGM colleagues that Selznick didn’t merely produce the picture, “He wrote it, and he half directed it,” while assuring him, “This is your picture, David. I am doing exactly what you tell me to do, and I hope it turns out all right.” Selznick’s overall purpose was to persuade Capra that the more Directors Guild members “talk about it, the more they are going to reveal just how much this was a producer-made picture.”

  That was a contentious tone to strike—especially in a letter Selznick encouraged Capra either to destroy or to use “in whole or in part” as a presentation to his board, or (in an odd wording) “for the excrescence of the Guild.” (It’s anyone’s guess whether he chose “excrescence” to mean that the letter would enlarge the guild’s understanding or inflame it.) Capra admired Fleming; six years later, he invited him to be part of his Liberty Pictures company, along with George Stevens and William Wyler. Selznick must have known that his words would get back to Fleming. Maybe he really felt, as he indicates to Capra, that Fleming would agree with him. Fleming did stay with the movie, attending the Riversid
e sneak and the L.A. press screening.

  Although Lu told both daughters that Vic refused to go to either Atlanta or the Oscars because of the way Selznick had treated him, Fleming made plans to participate in the premiere in Atlanta on Friday, December 15; he would have flown in on the same plane as Gable and Lombard. That undoubtedly was a topic of discussion on the preceding Sunday, when he spent the day visiting Douglas Fairbanks in Santa Monica. Fairbanks was planning to remake his great hit The Mark of Zorro as The Californian, although this time he would take a supporting role. Fleming probably thought his old friend and mentor needed a pep talk; Fairbanks, for most of the 1930s, had not been able to launch a number of announced projects, but this one was about to take wing, and despite having heart problems, he’d passed a recent physical.

  The following morning, Fairbanks suffered a mild heart attack and was put on immediate bed rest. Thirteen hours later, he had a second heart attack, this one fatal, in his bedroom overlooking the Pacific. A nurse came into the room when she heard his mastiff, Marco Polo, growling. “Doug has taken his last leap,” someone in the Fairbanks organization told the newspapers.

  The funeral was set for Thursday. Fleming chose to stay in California. He issued a dignified public statement: “Douglas Fairbanks was outstandingly the man who put motion into motion pictures. He lived and breathed action. He set an example that will remain part of the history of the films forever. He was a stanch [sic] friend and a fine influence.” To Ed Sullivan, Fleming said, “The stars of today are lazy people,” adding that Fairbanks was “the last of the great stars who really enjoyed working.”

  In Atlanta, Selznick’s publicity machine had merged with local boosters to create a premiere that made attendees feel that the South had risen again. Between industry favors and local freebies, he created a tidal wave of publicity on the cheap. No black actors were invited, not even McDaniel, who would win a deserved Oscar as best supporting actress for Mammy. America was in the thick of that post-Reconstruction, pre–civil rights era when sympathizing with the fallen South bordered on nostalgia for separatism.

  As president of Eastern Airlines, World War I ace Eddie Rickenbacker provided the plane that flew in Selznick, de Havilland, Leigh, and Olivier. After Gable, Lombard, and Howard Strickling arrived on the MGM plane, they traveled in a motorcade down Peachtree Street to their hotel; Gable was scheduled to raise the Stars and Bars there, but an elderly Confederate veteran received the dubious honor. Then they joined the rest of the Hollywood contingent at a charity costume ball put on by the Junior League at City Auditorium. Atlantans dusted off Confederate uniforms and antebellum costumes they either found in attics or rummage sales or made themselves to compete for costume prizes. Ten-year-old Martin Luther King Jr., son of the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, sang spirituals as part of a choir clothed in slave garb. Introducing them, Clark Howell Jr., publisher of the Atlanta Constitution, intoned, “Can you smell the wisteria? Can’t you hear the darkies singing? They’re coming to the Big House!”

  North Carolina’s comical musical celebrity Kay Kyser, in town to promote his movie debut, That’s Right, You’re Wrong, led his orchestra in “Dixie” to an approving roar, with several rebel yells. The novelty swing-band leader beckoned, “C’mon chillun—let’s dance!” and soon had high-style Atlantans swaying to songs like “I’m Fit to Be Tied” sung by Ginny Simms. NBC carried his performance live, and before leaving the stage, Kyser thanked Selznick “as a Southerner.” After witnessing two days of the celebration, a prominent local fertilizer dealer, Augustus D. Adair, recorded in his diary on December 16, “The Gone With the Wind festivities ended last night. I hope Atlanta will settle down once more. She’s been frantic all week.”

  While Kyser’s band played on, Fleming was hatching a meaningful memorial for Fairbanks during a long, drunken wake that ended up at Lucey’s, an Italian restaurant near Paramount Studios. Doug’s demise had leveled him as no death had done since his father’s. Fleming’s plan expressed his desire to relive the prank-filled days when he and Doug would cavort on trains, planes, and automobiles around the globe. Some friends of Doug’s, including Fleming and Ted Reed, didn’t like the brief, formal, invitation-only funeral held at the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather in Forest Lawn Memorial Park. Fairbanks was laid out in morning clothes. The church held only about a hundred mourners; others had to sit outside and listen on loudspeakers; and many of Fairbanks’s employees, left out of all that, held their own memorial service at his studio. His permanent grave was built later; that day, his coffin was placed in a temporary crypt, next to that of Will Rogers.

  As Reed handed down the story to his son Robert:

  They felt [the formal funeral] did not honestly reflect Fairbanks’s real personality. After a lengthy discussion, this group of five or six decided that the right thing to do was to exhume the freshly buried Fairbanks, sit him up at graveside, and have a final conversation with their friend. The conversation went on, punctuated with a lot of drinks, and the plan was eventually abandoned because no one was sober enough to carry it out. I remember my father recalling it with both remorse and relief.

  The plan would come to life four decades later, in a movie: Blake Edwards’s bleak 1981 Hollywood satire, S.O.B. Edwards knew Fleming from afar; he started out as an actor, and one of his first roles was in Fleming’s A Guy Named Joe. He also had an uncle, the writer-director-actor Owen Crump, who was married to Fairbanks’s niece Lucile, and Edwards heard the funeral story from him. The climax of S.O.B. is a case of one savvy, irreverent director paying homage to another. The friends of a late, crazed producer (Richard Mulligan)—his director (William Holden), PR man (Robert Webber), and doctor (Robert Preston)—decide to save him from a soundstage funeral full of the folks who drove him nuts. They steal his corpse from the mortuary, take him to his beach home so they can toast him, then really toast him when they shove him into a flaming rowboat for a makeshift Viking funeral.

  The scene is similar to the tale Errol Flynn told about John Barrymore’s pals stealing the Great Profile’s body from a funeral home in 1942, then propping it up in Flynn’s home as a lark. In S.O.B., Preston says, “Good night, sweet prince,” over Mulligan’s body, in a direct reference to Barrymore. But Edwards confided to Fay McKenzie, who had a small role in S.O.B., that he based the sequence on Fleming’s scenario. “Blake did love to tell that story,” she says.

  Against all odds, Gone With the Wind was an immediate sensation. It turned the search for blockbuster combinations of art and extravaganza into the American movie dream.

  Although he didn’t usually attend premieres of his MGM films, Fleming went to the Los Angeles premiere at the Carthay Circle theater. He and Lu shared a limousine with Gable, Lombard, and Gable’s father and new stepmother, William and Edna. They were the last to arrive, and when fans caught a glimpse of Gable, and Lombard in gold lamé, “pandemonium broke loose,” the papers reported, and the Flemings took charge of William and Edna as Gable greeted his fans and posed for photos.

  Fleming, nominated for best director, missed the Academy Awards ceremony at the Cocoanut Grove on February 29, 1940. The stated reason was influenza. Just as likely, however happy he was to play Selznick’s “Big Sam” at the wrap party, he didn’t want to do it on the industry’s night of nights. In Hollywood’s annus mirabilis of 1939, also nominated for best director were William Wyler for Wuthering Heights, John Ford for Stagecoach, Frank Capra for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Sam Wood for Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Gone With the Wind went on to win a total of eight Oscars and two additional special awards. The film of Fleming accepting his Oscar from Mervyn LeRoy was taken on March 8 for a Warner Bros. short subject and was directed by Capra; columnists gleefully reported that Fleming and LeRoy kept blowing their scripted lines. In his brief remarks, Fleming never breaks his deadpan as he thanks the people he says really deserve the award—the crew, not the filmmakers who were hogging praise in print.

  Although Fleming and Selznick didn’t work together aga
in, they did swap information and insight about projects and performers. Selznick’s papers contain a plaintive note to his publicist, Whitney Bolton, several years later: “I wish you’d call Victor Fleming and tell him about the opening and ask him whether he’d like any tickets for himself and party with my compliments. Let me know what he says.” There’s no record of Fleming’s response.

  Right up to Fleming’s death in 1949, Selznick exerted influence on the director’s career and personal life. At the time he was mounting Gone With the Wind, Selznick had been concluding negotiations to sign a young Swedish beauty who had the potential impact of another Greta Garbo. Rand Brooks remembered sitting next to Leslie Howard under hair dryers. As they looked in the mirror, there she was—Howard’s future co-star in Intermezzo and Fleming’s last great love—Ingrid Bergman.

  23

  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

  Before Fleming did his epic salvaging of The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind, he and Spencer Tracy, still flush with the success of their partnership on Captains Courageous and Test Pilot, planned on teaming up for an adaptation of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s superb novel The Yearling. After Gone With the Wind was finished, Fleming and Tracy approached John Steinbeck in December 1939 about filming The Red Pony, based on four linked stories set on a Salinas Valley, California, ranch early in the century. Its tale of a boy facing the death of a beloved animal and growing into a man made it close kin to The Yearling—with the added benefit of not requiring filming in Florida’s Everglades. But Steinbeck stunned Fleming and Tracy when he treated them as big-picture men to be exploited for his own ends rather than as fellow artists or craftsmen.