Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  Elia Kazan was eulogizing Fleming’s friend and partner Bud Lighton when he wrote, “He was against the New Deal of Roosevelt, believed that a real man would not accept relief, that it amounted to pity. He despised the East Coast, its ideology and the civilization there. He was for the frontiersman, who lived on a large tract of semiwilderness and asked no favors of his neighbor or of nature, the man who lived where he couldn’t hear his neighbor’s dog bark. Lighton despised communism but despised ‘liberals’ even more.”

  Fleming’s own politics must have been similar—but just how similar, and how intensely they mattered to him, remain enigmatic. Unlike Lighton, Fleming enjoyed New York and sophisticated company and even the friendship of a known communist, Dalton Trumbo. Like Lighton, he believed in America as the country of the self-made man. “I have no use for a poor man, because he hasn’t got the guts or intelligence to make something of himself,” Fleming said in 1947 within earshot of Joseph Steele, Ingrid Bergman’s manager/publicist in the 1940s (who also wrote that the director “laughed uproariously” after saying so).

  Apart from griping about the tax bite the New Deal put on his income (he was in the confiscatory top bracket), Fleming kept close counsel on politics with friends like Mahin, Gable, and Hawks. Even his daughters are hazy on the subject. “I used to hear Daddy complaining about the communists,” says Victoria. “He complained that Dore Schary was soft on them. Otherwise, I don’t remember him speaking in terms of individuals. It was always just the communists in general.” (Schary, production chief at RKO when that studio distributed Joan of Arc, was one of the few voices at the 1947 hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC, to assert that communism was “not as great a danger as it is represented to be.” He opposed the firing of the Hollywood Ten before they were jailed for contempt of Congress.)

  During his days with Fairbanks, that other Roosevelt, Theodore, was Fleming’s idea of a great man—and Theodore Roosevelt, of course, was a trust-busting, ecology-minded Republican, and later a Progressive. Fleming was equally hard to categorize. In the late 1930s, as a favor to Melvyn Douglas, he signed on as a sponsor of a benefit recital for war refugee relief given by Douglas’s wife, the actress-singer Helen Gahagan. She didn’t enter Congress as a liberal Democrat until 1945, but Fleming’s sponsorship is exactly the kind of well-intentioned activity that could have gotten him blacklisted or at least pegged as a fellow traveler of communists during McCarthyism’s height in the early 1950s. (In their 1950 contest for a California U.S. Senate seat, Richard Nixon dubbed Douglas “pink right down to her underwear.” The charge was scurrilous, but Nixon won. Douglas, in return, pinned Nixon with the sobriquet “Tricky Dick,” which followed him to his grave.)

  The sole sight of Fleming in direct political action comes from the deft liberal screenwriter Philip Dunne. With a Harvard degree and no future on Wall Street after the 1929 stock-market crash, Dunne, a son of the renowned newspaper humorist Finley Peter Dunne, used a letter of introduction from the movie critic of the New York World (where his brother was the drama editor) to get a job with the Fox studio boss, Winfield Sheehan. Dunne wrote skillful adaptations such as The Count of Monte Cristo, How Green Was My Valley, and the version of The Last of the Mohicans that was Michael Mann’s inspiration for his politically aware 1992 remake. Dunne was present at the creation of the Screen Writers Guild (the forerunner of today’s Writers Guild of America). “It was officially non-political,” he wrote in his 1980 memoir, Take Two, “but inevitably it had a liberal bias, even though one of our most respected presidents, Charles Brackett, was a Republican. For one thing, the very right of labor to organize was in itself a major political issue in the 1930s; for another, the minority of ultraconservative writers had split off to form the rival Screen Playwrights, leaving us with a center and a left, but no right wing.”

  In 1937, the SWG sent Dunne to a Directors Guild board meeting to test union solidarity. There he observed a telling scene starring Fleming. It gives Fleming the charisma and professional stature John Ford had when he berated the right wing of the Directors Guild, particularly Cecil B. DeMille, for trying to depose Joseph L. Mankiewicz as its president. But Dunne’s description puts Fleming in a comic, not heroic, light. “When we arrived before the meeting was called to order,” Dunne wrote, “the directors were discussing the Detroit sit-down strikes.” The CIO automobile workers had pioneered the strategy of going to their assembly lines and simply sitting down on the job—not doing the work. Fleming, “generally an engaging fellow,” had an extreme “reply to this new gambit of militant organized labor. ‘If I were running Ford or GM or Chrysler,’ he growled, ‘I’d get a lot of guys with machine-guns, poke them in through the windows, and mow the bastards down.’ He pantomimed firing a machine-gun and repeated, ‘Mow ’em down! That’s what I’d do!’ ” Dunne went to the meeting with his fellow SWG member Albert Hackett, co-writer of The Thin Man and later It’s a Wonderful Life and that tepid 1946 Virginian remake. They noted that discussion grew heated only when it turned to the studios’ refusal to do business with the Directors Guild. “Vic Fleming jumped up and restored a semblance of order,” Dunne wrote.

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute, fellows,” Vic said. “Let’s not get excited. Let’s not go off half-cocked. No strikes or demonstrations or any of that Communist shit.” Fleming pointed to his fellow top-of-the-line directors, including Wyler, Capra, Ford, Milestone, and Mamoulian. “All you guys are working,” he said. “I’m working. Here’s what we do. Tomorrow morning we walk on the set as usual, sit down beside the camera—and that’s it. We don’t rehearse, we don’t roll the camera, we don’t do one goddamn thing. We just sit on our ass all day. Then we’ll see what those bastards of producers will do about it.”

  After what Dunne called “reverent silence” from Fleming’s directing peers, the screenwriter Hackett, looking all “wide-eyed innocence” but with “a lethal wit,” responded, “That’s a great idea, Vic, but what do you do when Louis B. Mayer pokes a machine-gun through the window and starts mowing you down?”

  Fleming delivered his only other recorded and explicit political statement a half-dozen years later when he became a founding member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals—an organization for self-styled superpatriots and anticommunist zealots that grew out of the Screen Playwrights. The group officially lasted just sixteen years, sputtering into obscurity under the belligerent Bond. At its peak in the early 1950s, when John Wayne and the labor leader Roy Brewer were its presidents, it served as a clearinghouse of sorts for those wishing to get themselves removed from the Hollywood blacklist of real and suspected communists.

  When it began, in a display of high-powered presumption and naïveté, farcical in its details and tragic in its consequences, a small core of vitriolic right-wingers—all from MGM—attempted to enlist a federal agency in their effort to clean house and scour away any taint of political subversion or radicalism. On November 30, 1943, the MGM security chief, Whitey Hendry, and the screenwriter George Bruce invited Bruce Baumeister, from the FBI’s Los Angeles office, to a meeting at the studio. George Bruce mentioned (according to Baumeister’s report) that “persons in the various studios were grouping together to combat influences degrading the motion picture industry generally with particular emphasis being placed on fighting the communistic elements.” The following February the Motion Picture Alliance went public with its inaugural meeting at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Fleming was there; Mahin joined the group after he returned from service.

  In the years just before America’s entry into World War II, HUAC had tried to gin up outrage about supposed communist infiltration of the Hollywood workforce—and had gotten nowhere. (In one notable misstep from 1938, the committee’s star witness implied that ten-year-old Shirley Temple was a communist dupe.) But despite a comical mixture of hubris and ineptitude more suitable for a Marx Brothers movie than an anti-Marxist movement—indeed, one MPA member, Morrie Ryskind, co
-wrote A Night at the Opera, and another, James Kevin McGuinness, contributed to the story—the MPA created an environment of suspicion and fear in which political spite and paranoia flourished. It catalyzed the 1947 HUAC hearings, which brought on the blacklist of the 1950s.

  Along with Gary Cooper and Donald Crisp (the only actors in attendance), Fleming was one of 75 directors, producers, executives, and writers (all Screen Playwrights) who gathered at that first session. MGM dominated the MPA leadership, with 13 out of 24 positions; in another month, when membership had grown to 225, the FBI estimated that 200 came from the studio. When Fleming participated in the MPA on its executive committee, in 1944, virtually all the organization’s activities originated at MGM. James Kevin McGuinness, an MGM story editor as well as writer, had earlier founded the Screen Playwrights with Mahin, Howard Emmett Rogers (Tarzan and His Mate), and Patterson McNutt (Curly Top). McGuinness organized private meetings for the MPA in late 1943 and 1944 and was the first chairman of the MPA’s executive committee. Sam Wood was the MPA’s first president. The three vice presidents were Walt Disney (who contended that communists tried to wreck his studio), the director Norman Taurog, and the MGM designer Cedric Gibbons; the secretary was Louis Lighton (then at Fox); the treasurer, Clarence Brown; and George Bruce was executive secretary. Fleming was named to a ways and means committee with Gibbons and Brown.

  In the MPA, ideology mixed with bile and professional envy. Wood’s daughter Jean thought her dad’s right-wing furor derived from his bitterness over losing the best director Oscar for Goodbye, Mr. Chips—though he lost to his MPA colleague Fleming!—as well as his hatred of Roosevelt and the New Deal. Wood became possessed by anti-Marxism, listing suspected communists in a black notebook. “He was such a charming man—gentle, generous, dear . . . until ‘It’ came up. ‘It’ invariably transformed Dad into a snarling, unreasoning brute; we used to leave the dinner table with our guts tangled and churning from the experience.”

  In FBI memos, Fleming’s name appears solely on the roster of MPA officers. But he cast a giant shadow on men like Vidor, who also was a founding member of the MPA and part of its executive committee. In 1971, Vidor said it “did me harm for a while,” but that he had joined “simply because [Fleming] came in [and said] ‘You’re going with me tonight’ and we went to some sort of meeting and our name got in the paper. Not that I wouldn’t have done it, probably, but I wasn’t prepared to know what was going on and maybe I would have decided not. [We] got banned for being anti-Semitic and anti-everything and they got banned right and left from the radicals . . . They hopped on everybody.”

  William Ludwig, the screenwriter of Vidor’s An American Romance, was an SWG steward at MGM in 1944 when, in one frantic day, he was invited to join the Communist Party in the morning and recruited by Vidor for the MPA that afternoon:

  I said, “What are they for, King?” and he said, “We’re against this and against this, and against this, and especially against the Communists.” I said, “I know what the Alliance is against, but what are they for?” And he said, “What do you mean?” I said, “King, I have made up my mind that I’m not going to join things just because they are against something. I want to find, if there is such a thing, something that’s for what I’m for. What is your organization for, King?” There was a long pause, and King said, “I’ll have to talk to Sam Wood about that,” and he got up and left the office.

  No wonder the New Republic wrote, “Possibly nowhere but in Hollywood could a group of eminent and representative creative workers form a quasi-political organization and [say] ‘as Americans we have no new plan to offer. We want no new plan.’ ”

  The MPA’s ringleader, George Bruce, was a legendary, prolific creator of pulp novels in the 1930s, specializing in aerial adventures. He’d also published a couple of adventure-story magazines and briefly had his own radio series. In 1938, he boasted that by his own estimate, he had written more than twenty million words since 1920, “more words than any other author, living or dead, who wrote in English.” But in that first meeting with Baumeister, Bruce didn’t have anything to tell the FBI. Instead, he and other MPA founders fantasized that they could use the FBI as their own investigative force to vet potential members. Bruce knew that the agency had stepped up its surveillance of subversive groups after the outbreak of the war and, Hollywood being a gossipy place, also knew that the FBI had a list of Communist Party members. Los Angeles agents had first submitted that list, along with membership lists of other groups deemed subversive, to the FBI chief, J. Edgar Hoover, in August 1942.

  The FBI’s men hadn’t learned that the few directors who had the power to make socially conscious films were often right-wingers like Vidor. “I did Our Daily Bread for King,” the blacklisted actress Karen Morley told me a few years before her death, “and that made me popular in Russia; King was amused by that.” Why? I asked. “He was con-ser-va-tive.” But in a 1942 agency report, the Los Angeles bureau chief, Richard Hood, described Vidor as “beginning to show left-wing tendencies” because he had praised Russian films for not being dependent on the box office.

  Still, the agency “was very, very effective in those days,” Baumeister recalled. “Hoover was just fantastic. The boss was just loved by practically all the agents, because he stuck up for us, and defended us.”

  Officially, the FBI kept its distance from the MPA, suspecting that its leadership would zealously exploit any tie to the agency. But Hoover had a close connection to Ginger Rogers’s mother, Lela Rogers (a story editor at RKO), and to Hedda Hopper. In May 1944, a typical Hopper passage ran, “If trying to be a good American citizen is harmful, then I’m gonna hang onto that. Sure, the MPA attacks petty parlor pinks and all fellow travelers. When it accused some picture writers of being commies, it didn’t mince words.”

  While Hopper was extolling the MPA, however, Hoover was ordering his agents, “You should avoid becoming involved in any sort of controversy and at no time should the Bureau be permitted to be put in the position of taking any sides in this matter.”

  Baumeister, who joined the FBI in 1942 straight out of law school, received several visits from MPA organizers, who either registered complaints about attacks on them by Hollywood communists or provided minutes of MPA meetings. Six decades later, the affable Baumeister says, “I can’t remember the details of any of the reports I made. I made most of mine to Hoover personally.” But, he cautions, “a lot of things did not go into the record. That was done deliberately.”

  What did go into the FBI’s L.A. office and its records from late 1943 throughout 1944 was nearly as much foot traffic as went through the Hollywood Canteen—the Bette Davis–founded entertainment center for visiting GIs that the FBI, in its initial overenthusiasm, branded “a possible Communist front” because it employed labor unions. (Walter Wanger would drop by to complain to agents about the MPA’s attacks on him.)

  With the FBI not budging on revealing its list of Hollywood communists to the MPA, the group leadership tried a reckless gambit that could have landed Fleming and others in prison for receiving classified information. For the previous two years, the group’s secretary at its Beverly Hills office, Maribess Stokes, had worked for the Office of Naval Intelligence, then the nation’s premier spy agency. (George Bruce evidently took pride in telling this to the FBI, unaware of the warning flag he raised.) The FBI had shared the communist list with the ONI and other agencies to ensure that communists weren’t getting sensitive defense jobs.

  A Navy officer, Lieutenant Dan Goodykoontz, in civilian life a special agent for the Treasury Department and in war an expert in counterespionage, gave Stokes access to the names. She took shorthand notes and planned to send mimeographed copies of them to all twenty-four MPA officers, including Fleming. Whether he actually received a copy of the FBI’s communist list is a matter of conjecture. But the FBI quickly learned of the security breach, and Hoover made it a priority “to recover all copies of Stokes’s transcribed notes, based on a list of outstanding co
pies assigned by one of the MPA officials.” What happened to Stokes is not reflected in FBI memos, but Goodykoontz was transferred to the naval base in Keflavík, Iceland. Before he released the list to HUAC in 1947, Hoover knew some names had escaped, because in 1945 Wood boasted to a newspaper, “We even know their [party] card numbers.”

  The MPA was a launching pad for Lee Bowman. He later became TV’s first Ellery Queen, but he couldn’t maneuver himself into any decent big-screen parts after Smash-Up (1947); in 1948, he failed to parlay an appearance on the pilot episode of Lucille Ball’s radio-comedy series, My Favorite Husband, into a regular role. ( Jack Paar, then acting with Ball in Easy Living, recommended Richard Denning to replace him.) Gregg Oppenheimer, the son of the series writer Jess Oppenheimer, says he’d heard “Bowman was not a guy born to comedy; there was not a humorous bone in his body.”

  Politics was another matter. In the fall of 1946, George Murphy, the song-and-dance man who became a Republican senator from California, invited Bowman to make a speech in Whittier for “some young guy named Dixon or Nixon” running for Congress from a district that included San Dimas. “Murphy suggested he take my mother along and make a day out of it,” Lee Bowman Jr. recalls. “My mother replied, ‘Go to Whittier for a speech? You’ve got to be out of your mind! Call up your mother, she’ll go anywhere to listen to you!’ So he and my grandmother went, Richard M. Nixon defeated Jerry Voorhis, and the rest is history.” Bowman’s freshman congressman of choice became an influential member of HUAC. The lifelong friendship that ensued between the actor and the politician culminated in Bowman taking emcee jobs at the 1968 and 1972 Republican national conventions and subsequent inaugural balls, and a 1969 media consulting post with the National Republican Congressional Committee that gave him use of a Capitol Hill office. “He was acknowledged as a real pioneer in what is today a complete media-training industry,” says his son, a media-training consultant in London. “He used his work with politicians to develop a corporate clientele. He advised all the Republicans in the House and Senate on how to deal with appearances in front of TV cameras and in radio interviews . . . with the objectives of having their key messages come through loud and clear as well as having their real personal attributes.”