Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  Garson, too, plays a concept: the woman who must be knocked off her pedestal, then placed back on it. The script demanded the impossible—that Garson be convincing as a woman who falls in love with her man after she teams up with him to steal some chickens. It isn’t exactly Hepburn telling Bogart that she never experienced anything as thrilling as shooting the rapids on the African Queen. Garson may have had the right instinct to try a movie like this one, but she didn’t have the pluck to execute it. “Every time she had to work with [Gable], she wanted these black or navy blue velvet curtains all around the scene, with the directors and the actors,” Romay says. Garson found it impossible to conjure intimacy with a co-star if the crew and the sets beyond her soundstage were in her sight lines. Being shut off with an insecure leading man didn’t help her, either. “They did not get along personally at all. She was not easy to get along with.” The MGM publicist Emily Torchia got a $250 bonus for coming up with the famous ad line “Gable’s back and Garson’s got him!” Garson didn’t prefer the only alternative—“Gable puts the arson in Garson”—and counter-proposed, “Garson puts the able in Gable.” But everyone could see that wasn’t true. “He’d look at her as if she weren’t even there,” said Torchia. “It was the same with Jeanette MacDonald in San Francisco. With warm, earthy girls like Jean Harlow and Lana Turner, he was his usual charming self. With others he could be cold as ice.”

  “Adventure is definitely the worst picture I ever saw in my life,” Davis, the author of The Anointed, wrote his son. “Sign of the Cross and Sons of the Legion were fine productions by comparison. Gable is the worst ham in the business. I feel very sick to the stomach and low. Wish I hadn’t seen it. If I had seen the thing in preview I would have demanded that they take my name off it. It’ll do me irreparable harm. And I had nothing to do with it.”

  Adventure marked Fleming’s clean break from MGM. Aside from the parking-lot incident, the studio couldn’t have been more respectful. The executives asked his permission to give Sam Zimbalist a producer’s contract; he told them they were under no legal obligations to him and he’d accept Zimbalist’s name on the film anyway. (It was still, of course, “A Victor Fleming Production.”) They even composed a letter for his signature requesting a three-month leave, not wanting him to lose his place in the Pension Fund if he did come to terms during that time.

  Fleming never came back. It may be that his friend Lew Wasserman, the innovative agent who would become famous for negotiating groundbreaking gross-package deals for his clients (notably Jimmy Stewart), encouraged him to bide his time and consider a new option: independence. Fleming flirted with his pal Vidor’s plan to form a director’s co-op along with Hawks and Tay Garnett. “That would have been a nice group,” Vidor said, but nothing happened: Hawks thought he could do more movies on his own, and Garnett’s story choices flummoxed Vidor. When the already-established independent directors’ company Liberty Films, made up of Capra, Wyler, George Stevens, and the producer Sam Briskin, threatened to go aground after the release of its first movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, Capra approached Fleming to join their partnership. Then Capra and Briskin went another way, persuading Wyler and a reluctant Stevens to accept the sale of Liberty to Paramount.

  There were other reasons for Fleming to leave MGM. The MPA tainted the atmosphere at the group’s home studio. Odd weeds now grew along political fault lines. In 1944, the former producer Maurice Revnes, a Mannix assistant and the liaison between MGM and the Office of Naval Intelligence (and the Bureau of Motion Pictures), had developed a hatred for the MPA and began sending out poison-pen letters to besmirch anyone he thought affiliated with it. In a letter to Arthur Freed’s wife, Renée, he disclosed Freed’s affair with the actress Lucille Bremer, who was playing the oldest sister, Rose, in Freed’s Meet Me in St. Louis. Freed discovered Bremer when she was a featured dancer in nightclub acts, and his affair with her would have been a scoop at the time; Meet Me in St. Louis had begun filming the previous November. According to George Bruce and MGM’s top in-house cop, Whitey Hendry (who’d hired a handwriting and typing expert to check the documents), Revnes was also behind a letter sent to Mildred Rogers, the wife of the MPA executive committee member Howard Emmett Rogers; it contended that her husband was having an affair with Sue Ream, one of Louis B. Mayer’s secretaries, who was engaged to the MPA vice president, Norman Taurog (and did marry Taurog that year). Hendry thought Revnes’s attacks “were motivated by personal jealousy” and said “he is not acting as an instrument of the communists.” Never a well-liked figure (in past studio jobs he’d alienated Preston Sturges when Sturges was on the way up), Revnes soon left his Thalberg Building office to work as a talent agent. But J. Edgar Hoover was a glutton for sexual gossip, so his agents found justification for passing along the story; not even a month after D day, they made sure Hoover could savor some Hollywood dish among reports of potential espionage. Freed’s daughter, Barbara Saltzman, was surprised to learn that her father turned up in an FBI memo about communists and anticommunists: “My father was probably the most apolitical person around. He believed, ‘My president, right or wrong,’ you know. But probably he was involved in Republican politics sometimes, because Mayer, you know, was Republican.”

  The screenwriter George Oppenheimer said that after World War II “everybody was out for himself. [The producer Joe] Pasternak was delighted when Freed had a flop. Freed was delighted when Pasternak had a flop. The heart had gone out of it. [In the cafeteria] the center table, with McGuinness, Mahin and Rogers, referred to the writers’ table as the Moscow Club.” And the MGM executive committee was as oppressive as the MPA executive committee; it now contained almost a score of what Fleming had called those “blank blank blank blanks up on the third floor.”

  In retreat from the MPA and MGM, Fleming threw himself into family life. Responding to a 1946 polio outbreak, which catalyzed what health officials called “a moderate epidemic” in Los Angeles, he bought an island near Vancouver, British Columbia, and made it a family retreat. His old friend and fellow voyager Fred Lewis helped him buy horseshoe-shaped Knapp Island, which had been a Hudson Bay trading post and could offer anchorage and protection for large ships. (Lewis was already living on nearby Coal Island.) Fleming also purchased Frank Morgan’s eighty-one-foot diesel cruiser, the Dolphin, docked at Newport Beach, and the four-man crew sailed it up the coast while the family flew to Knapp Island. (The Flemings sailed only on the calmer return trips down the coast.)

  Knapp Island was an ideal place for Fleming to hobnob with Lewis and educate and amuse Victoria and Sally. He taught them how to paddle rowboats and fish for salmon. Victoria remembers that he conducted treasure hunts with candy: “Daddy used to hide rock candy on the beach. He’d hide it in the pebbles and we would have to find out which was the candy. That and the island are the best part of my memories.” He had created an oasis of enchantment for his daughters. It lasted only for a moment.

  29

  Ingrid Bergman and Joan of Arc

  The making of Fleming’s last picture, Joan of Arc, became one of those behind-the-scene sagas far more fascinating than the finished film, like the productions of Cleopatra or Apocalypse Now or Heaven’s Gate. It would span a decade and a half of creative flirtations, turbulent love affairs, and discordant ambitions. In the end it would humble a renowned playwright, Maxwell Anderson; a towering director, Fleming; and an adventurous producer, Walter Wanger. Even its presentation of Ingrid Bergman as an apple-cheeked warrior-saint—the ultimate tomboy heroine—backfired shortly after the film’s release, when the American public condemned her for deserting her husband, Dr. Petter Lindström, and their daughter, Pia, for the Italian director Roberto Rossellini.

  Released in December 1948, Joan of Arc would bear the credit “A Victor Fleming Production.” But Anderson and Bergman were the catalysts for retelling the story of the peasant girl who was born in 1412 in the village of Domrémy, near the line dividing the provinces of Lorraine and Champagne. They were the ones commi
tted, in contradictory ways, to celebrating her heroism (and martyrdom) when she responded to the voices of three angel-saints, rallied an army against the English, and crowned a king of France in the thick of the Hundred Years’ War. The fight to transform Anderson’s modernist 1946 play, Joan of Lorraine, into the church-pageant-like Joan of Arc became a battle royal.

  In 1934, Anderson was at the crest of his fame as a dramatist who could turn contemporary and historical subjects into blank verse and Broadway hits. So when the producer Pandro S. Berman wanted to commission a prestige writer to do a Joan of Arc screenplay for the director-star team of George Cukor and Katharine Hepburn, the RKO-based filmmaker commanded representatives in New York to go after the playwright. But Anderson was busy, so they signed Thornton Wilder instead, for a work that never got past the treatment stage.

  In 1940, David O. Selznick took Wilder’s treatment out of mothballs only because he knew Joan was one of Ingrid Bergman’s dream roles. A shower of news items promised a Bergman Joan of Arc as Selznick’s epic follow-up to Gone With the Wind. His New York story editor, Kay Brown, proposed hiring Winifred Lenihan, a veteran of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, to assist Selznick’s Swedish star with her characterization of the French saint as well as her command of English (her third language, after Swedish and German). But Selznick had aesthetic qualms about trying to push through a Joan of Arc movie, even with his prize protégée and the expatriate Jean Renoir attached to direct. (Renoir was appreciated here—his Grand Illusion had been nominated for an American best picture Oscar, running against Test Pilot.) In his usual blizzard of memos, Selznick doubted the vitality of Joan as a film subject and feared adulterating “Ingrid’s natural talent” with stage technique. And he may have experienced the same qualms Victor Saville sensed at MGM when he was supposed to go back to England to direct Garbo in a Joan of Arc movie: “We never got around to it because the Allies invaded Normandy and I suppose they thought it was hardly the picture to make.”

  Whether Joan of Arc stuck in Anderson’s mind for a decade or changing times suddenly made her story more relevant, eleven years later he wrote the stage piece A Girl from Lorraine, which eventually became Joan of Lorraine. Although the play hasn’t worn well, it proved a commercial and critical comeback for Anderson. (He hadn’t had a hit since Key Largo in 1939.)

  Forsaking his usual blank verse for prose, he employed a play-within-a-play format to dramatize the conflict between idealism and compromise, which stirred returning veterans as well as home-front idealists. Should Joan stick to her vision of uniting France under its Dauphin, even if the Dauphin she aims to make king is a self-loathing coward surrounded by opportunists? Can she reconcile her divine dream of expelling the English with the subterfuge and decadence of the French court? How can any higher faith endure an environment that prizes power and money? Reading Joan of Lorraine (it’s much easier to read than to perform), you can tell it came from the same period as The Best Years of Our Lives.

  Because of Bergman, whom even a skeptical Anderson called “incandescent,” it broke records on Broadway for a limited run. Casting Bergman was the idea of Anderson’s common-law wife, Mab, and it clicked: Bergman told Anderson, as she had Selznick, that Joan was her ideal role. From the beginning, an eventual movie version was part of Anderson’s prospectus. “I naturally want you to play Joan in the picture also,” Anderson wrote Bergman, pledging that if she promised to star as Joan on-screen, he would “hold the rights in the hope that you and I together may be able to work out a project for producing the picture ourselves.” To spur on Bergman, Anderson mentioned Hepburn as a possible competitor. But she didn’t need much persuading. She signed the contract on a California beach on V-E Day (May 8, 1945). “I’m not making any of this up,” Anderson wrote, recounting the tale in The New York Times. During the previous twelve months, Bergman had made Spellbound, Saratoga Trunk, the immensely popular The Bells of St. Mary’s, and that nonpareil romantic thriller, Notorious. She was a huge film star at her peak—she and her Bells co-star, Bing Crosby, were voted the top box-office attractions of 1946—and a budding theatrical idealist.

  In retrospect, Joan of Lorraine seems eerily observant and prophetic of the trials of Fleming’s Joan of Arc. It’s about backstage quarrels in a contemporary theater as well as Joan’s verbal battles with the inquisitors who try her for heresy. Joan squares off against her foes in a play within the play; the framing story and the dramatic spine are a marathon rehearsal clash between a fictional director, Jimmy Masters, and his lead actress, Mary Grey. By the final revisions, Mary Grey and Ingrid Bergman bled into each other. “I have always wanted to play Joan,” Mary says in the rehearsal scenes of Joan of Lorraine. “I have studied her and read about her all my life. She has a meaning for me. She means that the great things in this world are all brought about by faith—that all the leaders who count are dreamers and people who see visions.” Mary objects to the way Masters allows the play to be revised. She wants the theme to be “if you die in a great cause,” then “your sacrifice is not lost—and the world can be better and different because of your dying.” Instead, the play within the play demonstrates that even a saint can strike deals with sinners (though, Mary discovers, only up to a point).

  Almost two-thirds of the way through Joan of Lorraine, Mary says, ominously, “An actress is held responsible for the plays she chooses, remember.” But she does come to see the wisdom of the director and the playwright. They characterize Joan as an idealist who can make earthly concessions—until they directly threaten her spiritual life. Several scenes would survive in some form all the way into the film version. Joan’s ally, Dunois, the Bastard of Orléans, advises her to stay in King Charles VII’s court and serve as a balance to her monarch’s decadence and corruption rather than leave in disgust. Near the end, Joan tells her one clerical ally, Massieu, “To surrender what you are, and live without belief—that’s more terrible than dying—more terrible than dying young.” (She also says, “To live your life without faith is more terrible than the fire.”)

  Bergman told reporters she approved of Anderson’s Joan. “She was the kind of young woman I think she was in life, a simple peasant girl who loved a home and children,” neither “a tomboy” nor “the dangerous fanatic” of Shaw’s Saint Joan. Echoing Mary Grey again (or was it vice versa?), Bergman continued, “She was driven on by an unswerving faith—a faith so strong she could not renounce it even to save her own life. It is faith of this kind that moves mountains and makes one succeed in any undertaking.” On a USO tour through postwar Germany with Jack Benny and the harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler (who wrote that he was her lover), she performed monologues from the play, even though (in Adler’s recollection) bored GIs were blowing up condoms like balloons and waving them at her.

  “Ingrid was a dear, very sweet soul,” recalls Maxwell’s son Alan Anderson. “It was a scary, tough job for an actress who had not only the normal work of a devoted professional, but language was on her mind always.” She had mastered English sufficiently to pull off a fragmented film schedule with ease. Conquering an entire stage play in her new language was still daunting—especially one that depended on her in every scene (unlike Liliom, in which Burgess Meredith co-starred).

  Bergman began to show her clout during the Washington, D.C., tryout. She protested the racial segregation at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium. And Anderson fired the original director, Margo Jones, because he felt she wasn’t up to the challenge of making nuances heard and felt in a large, echoing auditorium. The producers wouldn’t have made that move without their star’s advice and consent (though Bergman in her 1980 book, My Story, says the firing shocked her). Bergman’s co-star, Sam Wanamaker, who played Mary Grey’s director, Masters, became Bergman’s actual director, with uncredited assistance from Alan Anderson, who was already working as his father’s stage manager. “I have a feeling everyone agreed, including Bergman,” Anderson says. “Margo Jones really had no experience. Never should have be
en there.”

  When Masters falls into an old crush he had on Mary, he tells her, “You’ll forgive an old admirer for sort of relapsing a bit and—admiring you?” By the time preproduction on Fleming’s Joan of Arc began, with Anderson working on a new script, the backstage plot of Joan of Lorraine would come to life in two ways. Bergman and Fleming were having an affair—and some felt that Bergman had come to believe (in the words of Anderson’s daughter, Hesper) “that she was the reincarnation of Joan.”

  On opening night, November 18, 1946, at the Alvin Theater in New York, she triumphed. “Six years ago,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times, “Miss Bergman paused briefly in New York to play in a revival of ‘Liliom’ en route to Hollywood. Her beauty was extraordinary then, and her gifts as an actress seemed to be considerable. Since then her gifts have multiplied and prospered, and Miss Bergman has brought into the theatre a rare purity of spirit.” At the end of 199 sold-out performances Variety reported, “She is regarded as the most successful repatriate from the coast, in marked contrast to Spencer Tracy in The Rugged Path.”

  Terese Hayden, who joined the cast in January 1947 as the Dauphin’s mistress, thought there was no question what made the play so popular. Bergman “was a magnificent physical presence,” and audiences “were thrilled to just walk into the theater and [be] where she was. They don’t make them like that anymore. This was Ingrid at the top of her powers.” Those powers, Hayden cautions, were mesmeric, not thespian. “I don’t think Ingrid was a first-class actress,” she says. “I thought she was a marvelous girl. I don’t think she was particularly fine in the play.” Kevin McCarthy, who played the Bastard of Orléans, also admired her personally. “She was such an unusual person,” he says. “She had a perfect kind of freshness.” Critics sounded similar notes: Louis Kronenberger (in the leftist daily PM) and Atkinson called her “radiant.” George Jean Nathan begged to differ: in the New York Journal American he called the production “a Readers’ Theatre performance of Percy MacKaye’s Joan of Arc, directed by a second cousin of Pirandello and interrupted from time to time by some old patent medicine doctor with faith and hope messages from Mr. Anderson and with a popular screen actress as ballyhoo.”