Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  Back in Hollywood, Grady still needed to fill the role of Jody’s friend, the frail, magical Fodderwing, with a boy who could match Eckman’s accent. Fleming and Franklin hadn’t yet agreed on how to cast strict, grief-hardened Ma Baxter and the raucous Forrester men, partly because Fleming was intent on using fresh faces. Sidney joked, nervously, that Tracy “has been playing Mr. Hyde to such an extent that we’re afraid to out him with the boy for fear he would tear him to pieces. It seems to be affecting his disposition, so we have to leave the poor guy alone until he gets out of character.” Fleming settled on Anne Revere to play Ma Baxter. Educated at Wellesley College and acclaimed on the Broadway stage, she seemed an odd choice for a matriarch to Franklin. But she’d go on to give a full-bodied, Academy Award–winning performance as a heroic rural mother in National Velvet (1944) and a piercing, haunting performance as a warping mother in A Place in the Sun (1951). Franklin commented, “On account of Vic liking her so much better than anyone else we had, we all seemingly agreed it wouldn’t be a catastrophe.”

  On April 18, as Fleming boarded an eastbound train, Franklin wired him “a great deal of good luck and success on your new venture” and pledged support for anything the director “may need or desire.” Fleming, Hal Rosson, and the cast arrived within days of one another at the end of April and the beginning of May. Thanks to Rawlings, the group enjoyed some instant, if fleeting, bonhomie. On first sight of Eckman, Rawlings hugged the boy and exclaimed, “You are Jody!” For the local press, Tracy reported himself content, but Worsley said the company’s base, the former Ocala Country Club, “at best was a third-rate hotel, and with no air conditioning.” Miles deep into the Big Scrub, MGM carved out service roads for passenger cars, trucks, and buses. Tracy soaked his legs in insecticide between shots. Fleming ordered air-conditioning.

  A Hollywood production on primitive territory inevitably won wide attention. Dora Byron, on location for The New York Times, said the worst obstacle was the sand flying in the works of “many a smart Hollywood station wagon.” Byron watched Fleming shoot Tracy and Eckman approaching the Forrester family manse. Getting the pigs scurrying and the chickens squawking and Tracy asking, “Is it all right for a feller to git down here?” with the right rhythms and cadences ate up most of the day. “Tobacco-chewing Spencer Tracy, dressed in a slouchy brown and gray outfit topped by a wide-brimmed hat, bears little resemblance to a glamorous Hollywood star,” Byron told her readers. “Finally the scene is finished and Tracy sinks into his canvas chair with relief. A pig roots comfortably at his feet . . . In addition to pigs, chickens and ‘houns’ are twenty-four deer, six bears, a bobcat, eight coons, two foxes, twenty squirrels, quail, owls, doves, and ‘buzzards.’ ”

  Fleming directed Eckman twice. In the movie’s very first scene, Jody, lolling on a creek bank after building a palm-frond mill wheel (or “flutter-mill,” as Jody calls it), nervously scans the sky to guess the time of day and begins running home. Fleming wanted Jody to look worried as he ran up the road. Eckman fondly recollects, “He had me running about five times, and I thought the camera was not working. [Then] he got in my face and said, ‘I’m not going to put up with this anymore!’ He wasn’t mean or anything, but I wanted to believe him, because he was that type of person. He got the scene.” In a vignette dramatizing the boy’s desire to have a pet, Jody spots a bird whistling outside his cabin window and tries to communicate with it. “He wanted me to try to whistle back at the bird, you know, copy the bird, and, of course, I had no idea how to do it. And because I didn’t know how to do it, it turned out very well.” (In Clarence Brown’s film, Claude Jarman Jr. doesn’t whistle; he just fixes his eyes on the tweeter.) As far as Eckman was concerned, Fleming “got what he wanted. He was a genius to do it, I think.”

  When the press wasn’t looking, Eckman noticed that Tracy was getting antsy. A bunch of dogs “kind of screwed around on the scene, and Spencer didn’t like it.” Eckman also heard “through the grapevine” that Tracy “didn’t like his accommodations.” John Marquand later said Tracy declared that “he was goddamned if he would act with any little boy with an accent like that, it was too hot anyway, and the whole thing was corny and would ruin his reputation.” The New York Times, too, would report that Eckman’s “southern accent” and “the idiom of the dialogue” made his delivery hard to comprehend and “the contrast between his speech and Tracy’s was so great that it was ridiculous.”

  Franklin wrote, “When on location, the director knows the cost per day is terrific, and this puts him under tremendous pressure. Hence he is over sensitive to interruption and delay.” But Franklin’s rain of wires didn’t help dispel tension for Fleming, who once wired back: “JUST SAT DOWN AND READ SCRIPT AND YOUR TELEGRAM TO DEER + FEEL HE WILL DO BETTER HEREAFTER.” Having an ambitious young man named Jerry Bresler on his production staff was no help to Fleming. Even after Bresler became a successful producer, he retained what Sam Peckinpah’s biographer David Weddle characterized as a “nervous, hen-pecking manner” guaranteed to rile any tough, independent director. Rawlings reported that Bresler “made a lot of trouble, keeping everybody stirred up against everybody else.”

  On May 19, Fleming shut the production down and returned to Hollywood. On May 22, the publicist Eddie Lawrence wrote Rawlings not to believe what she’d be reading in the newspapers. He chalked up any bad PR to normal grousing: “When the boys get home, they relish telling what a hard time they had. I have a helluva time trying to keep them in line. This is a stupid town that delights in picking out the worst in anything, with trimmings . . . Too, Tracy and Fleming are worriers. They work best that way, seeing the dark side. If they are ever happy with a picture in the making, it is sure to be a bust. The more they worry, the harder they work and the better the final result.”

  But within days, Fleming stepped down, and MGM named King Vidor to replace him. Soon Eddie Mannix was telling Louella Parsons, “We didn’t agree on the story and the production, and since Victor has the right to do things his way, he asked for his release. He felt that things had not been arranged properly for the company in Florida, and perhaps he had his grievance, too.” The New York Times reported that “Fleming doesn’t like producers, anyway,” and that Franklin’s supervision had given him a Gone With the Wind flashback.

  Rawlings probably came up with the closest rendering of the truth in a letter to her friend Bee McNeil:

  I was only on the set twice and I could tell Fleming wasn’t satisfied with Anne Revere or the boy. He was very nervous, taking sleeping tablets, etc., and felt he could handle things much better on the Hollywood sets. The wind registered on the soundtrack, not sounding like wind at all, etc. The boy Gene Eckman, in looks and personality, seemed quite all right, but the sound man had me listen in, and it was true, as he complained, that the boy was not enunciating and his lines were not registering. Tracy was bored and morose. Anne Revere is not Ma Baxter as I visualize her but had a fine pioneer look and I thought she was all right, but she didn’t seem to “put out” emotionally in the one scene I saw her do.

  Nonetheless, Franklin put the blame solidly on Fleming for being unable to handle the challenges of the location and the pressure of his own lofty standards. Franklin wrote to the screenwriter Paul Osborn, “Things became so bad and mounted so terrifically in Vic’s mind, his sense of responsibility to the terrific overhead and the small number of scenes being shot every day deepened, and his discouragement continued to grow.” Franklin contended that Fleming “hadn’t gotten anything down there that was usable,” but the Brown picture would use some of the atmospheric shots, and Brown adopted the Osborn script that Franklin and Fleming had prepared. Franklin said, “No one really knew what had happened to Vic, as we all knew him to be a very powerful, courageous and strong character, but on discussing it when he was back he made the declaration that he wanted to be taken off the picture.”

  Fleming passed his own view of the disaster down to Elia Kazan via Bud Lighton. According to Lighton, Fleming told F
ranklin and the MGM execs, “How can I make a picture whose essence is that people love each other, when no one in the cast loves anyone or loves being down there or loves making the picture? They only love themselves. The kid wants to be a goddamn star and thinks of nothing except his vanity. Tracy is only thinking how he can get away for a few days to go up to New York and see Hepburn. And the mother part is always between a shit and a sweat about something, but never about the goddamn picture.” To Kazan, Fleming “had more experience and more guts” on The Yearling than Kazan had on his Tracy-Hepburn fiasco, The Sea of Grass (1947). So Fleming did on The Yearling what Kazan wanted to do on The Sea of Grass (but couldn’t) and quit the picture.

  Margaret Mitchell wrote Rawlings, “What ails the works of us Southern lassies? Why is it so hard to translate us into another medium? I have been wondering seriously if there is something about the Southern scene which is difficult to capture in the movies if it is to be captured honestly.” Admitting “I do not pretend to understand the workings of the Hollywood mind any more than I understand the motives of Igorot headhunters,” she voiced the “sincere hope that the movie mixup straightens out.” Later she confessed, “The Yearling is such a beautiful book that I selfishly would rather have it never come to the screen than have it done wrong—or have half of it done by one director and half by another. Doubtless when it does come to the screen the Forrester boys will be dashingly portrayed by the Marx brothers.” Actually, Jeff Corey did a screen test for Fleming as one of the Forresters. “He wanted me to play one of the wild brothers,” Corey recalled. “What Anne Revere later told me was that things were so uncomfortable in the bayous in Florida that Spence began to drink heavily, which annoyed Fleming, and they just couldn’t go on with it.”

  Clarence Brown, who turned The Yearling into a family-film masterpiece five years later, offered this explanation for the debacle: “Victor Fleming, one of the greatest directors, started the picture, but he had just come off the greatest picture ever made, Gone With the Wind, and he just wasn’t at home with three people. He went on location in Florida and tried, but it was lousy. They shelved it for a year, and then I took it up. Fleming’s problem was the kid. He was lousy.”

  The problem may have been the kid and everything else. Echoing what Lighton told Kazan, the MGM in-house magazine Lion’s Roar reported several years later that Fleming overheard his principal actors on a film talk about their dinner plans at 2:00 p.m. on a shooting day. “Our minds are not on this picture,” he said. “Let’s all go home and come back when we really have our minds cleared of other things.” And he did shut production down for the rest of the day. “But,” he told his interviewer, “I was so sorry. It was terrible of me to act that way.”

  25

  Bonhomie in Bel-Air and Tortilla Flat

  Any MGM executive thinking The Yearling had extinguished Fleming’s fire would soon change his mind. For three days in August, Fleming consulted with Eddie Mannix on the studio’s attempt to keep the project going, then took off for a two-month vacation. While he was away, reports filled the entertainment wires of him and Hawks co-directing an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” to star Gary Cooper, for Goldwyn. An assistant treasurer at Loew’s shot a letter to Goldwyn, Hawks, Cooper, and Hemingway, demanding they respect MGM’s exclusive-services contract with Fleming. Zoltan Korda made the film as The Macomber Affair five years later; Gregory Peck would be at his pinnacle both as the Great White Hunter in the Hemingway story and as Penny Baxter under Brown’s direction in The Yearling. Fleming took notice. When he began preparing the biblical epic The Robe in 1948, he and his producer tapped Peck to be their star.

  Rawlings heard from John Marquand that “Fleming had a nervous breakdown,” and the report contained some truth. Edward Hartman visited Moraga Drive near the end of May 1941, shortly after Fleming’s return from Florida. Slocum met him at the door and cautioned him, “There’s been a bit of a disturbance here . . . Mr. Bowman and his wife are not to be allowed on this property, ever again.” What set off the explosion was the Bowmans’ decision to send seven-year-old “little Helene,” big Helene’s daughter from her first marriage, to Ojai for boarding school. Little Helene’s daughter, Kate Harper, says Fleming “felt my mother was getting short shrift from her mother and stepfather. He already thought she spent more time with nannies than with them, so they could attend to their social whirl.” (Sally Fleming never saw Lee and Helene Bowman at the house again “until after Daddy died,” though little Helene and Lee Bowman Jr., born in 1943, did come for visits.)

  Aside from the uproar over the Bowmans, Fleming’s home became his haven, especially after Hawks bought a 105-acre spread at the tip of Moraga Drive and moved in with his ultrachic second wife, Nancy “Slim” Gross, who became a fast friend of Lu’s. The Flemings welcomed Hawks and Athole Shearer’s children into their home: Barbara, then five, and David, then eleven. David remembers, “Vic was more of a Victor McLaglen rugged sort, not Errol Flynn dashing. I thought he was the ultimate man’s man: truthful, upright, not afraid to speak his mind,” and interested in “knowing your mind.” Says Barbara Hawks McCampbell: “He was Uncle Vic to me and she was Auntie Lu. I had no idea until I was much older that we lived next to someone so famous.”

  Shortly after Hawks became his neighbor, Vic expanded his Moraga spread by ten acres. “When he got that property,” says Sally, “he became a country boy again.” Soon a whiff of old San Dimas blew into this Bel-Air estate. Fleming planted nearly five acres of oranges and, on the canyon wall above the house, lemons, then plums, cherries, apples, walnuts, avocados, and cherimoya. Beehives pollinated the trees. He erected a chicken house and filled it with Rhode Island Reds. Any chicken-home invaders, mostly coyotes, ended up trapped or shot.

  “There were occasionally feral cats on the property, and he’d shoot them, too,” Victoria says. Once a stray mounted Victoria’s female calico, K.C., by the pool. “He took his pellet gun and shot it . . . A single shot. He knew he wouldn’t miss.” Fleming dealt with animal nature the way he did with human nature, directly and instinctively. The family dog, Judy, killed a bird once, so he tied the avian corpse around the dog’s neck. The dog hated to have that bird rotting around her neck, and so grew to hate catching birds. It was animal aversion therapy.

  “We’d have big barbecues,” Sally says. “And Fourth of July parties which were huge. I remember Hoagy Carmichael singing to me on the piano.” Cookouts at the Flemings’ were memorable for the Hawks kids, too. “Jimmy Durante was there a lot,” says Barbara. “You’d go home to sleep and go back over for breakfast. Uncle Vic had dinner for breakfast; chops and steaks and things like that.” Jules Furthman, now Hawks’s (not Fleming’s) steady writer, was still a social standby. And Tracy visited occasionally with his son, John. “He neither spoke nor signed, but we would try to play with him,” says the girls’ pal Winnie Weshler. “And Clark Gable came once in a while, and like every other movie-struck teenager we were hiding around corners trying to get a good look.” Other regulars included Mahin, Lighton, “Uncle Hal” Rosson, and Douglas Shearer. Ward Bond “practically lived there,” says Sally. “There was no ostentation. Daddy protected his family . . . from the sleazy people. We didn’t even know what he did until we got older.”

  Barbara Hawks never went to Fleming’s movie sets with his daughters as she did to the sets of her father’s other friends. “Family was separate from business with them,” she says emphatically, “one of the best ways to keep a family life.” The Fleming girls rarely even went out to the movies or restaurants. When the servants were off, the Flemings ate dinner at the Bel-Air Country Club. Victor intended to give his daughters security and normalcy.

  “He wanted us to be regular kids, and we were,” says Victoria. To make sure of it, “he got involved in every detail of our wardrobes, down to our socks.” Sally says, “We were always wearing shorts and T-shirts, and [we were always] in the garden, so that we were cloistered, and we
were protected maybe a little too much . . . and our life was very plain. We were always within the bounds of the house, or the grounds, or we were in a car going to school. We were never, you know, out and about.” Although not a churchgoer himself, Fleming sent the girls to Sunday school at a Methodist church and later enrolled them at Mary-mount, a Catholic school. “He wanted us to get some spiritual background and stay away from show business,” says Victoria.

  When he came home, he would sit in a swing on the lawn “and give the children some time that was just time,” says their friend Weshler. “I remember making daisy chains and putting them around his neck.” If problems dogged him at the studio, he dined with Lu and the girls at 6:30 on the dot, then returned to MGM that night. Lu, an accomplished cook, grew her own bean sprouts for Chinese meals. Weshler says dinners were “disciplined”: “If we were eating Chinese food, we had to get it with the chopsticks; they would not let you eat with anything else.” Fleming’s daughters knew how to read him. Sally says, “He’d just fix you with a glare, and you knew. Whatever it was you were doing that you weren’t supposed to be doing, you stopped. That was all he ever had to do.”