Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  “Everybody you ever heard of in Hollywood came to see the play,” Hayden recalls. “The most beautiful, in my memory, was Gary Cooper.” Bergman complained to Hayden that Greta Garbo never showed up. “I was in Stockholm last year, sent flowers, and made it very clear I would love to see her,” Bergman said, “but she didn’t even respond.” Well, why wouldn’t Bergman feel a little petulant about it? Every night a large group of fans who dubbed themselves “the Alvin [Theater] Gang” waited to greet her by the stage door. “Steinbeck and Hemingway saw the show,” she reported to her English coach and lifelong friend Ruth Roberts, and “Hemingway said I was the greatest actress in the world.”

  Roberts was a good pal to have, for her loyalty and her industry savvy as the sister of George Seaton, who scored a critical and popular hit with his script for The Song of Bernadette (1943) and had just directed Miracle on 34th Street (1947). Roberts may have fostered Bergman’s tendency to push Joan toward schoolgirl notions of uncomplicated sainthood. Bergman chose to perform half-hour radio condensations of The Bells of St. Mary’s with Crosby on August 26, 1946—before rehearsals began for Joan of Lorraine—and on October 5, 1947, just after the start of Fleming’s Joan of Arc. It was as if she thought playing the feisty yet wholesome Sister Mary Benedict, the feminine counterpart to Crosby’s resourceful, unflappable Father O’Malley, was the best way of getting into character.

  Dr. Petter Lindström was Bergman’s strong, handsome husband—no pushover in matters of money or the heart. Hollywood types who found him a hard bargainer on his wife’s behalf always referred to him as a dentist, but as Pia Lindström, his and Ingrid’s daughter, testifies, “Petter never was a dentist. He got his Ph.D. and taught dentistry as part of his plan to pay for medical school.” In the United States, he studied medicine at the University of Rochester in the early 1940s and then became a neurosurgeon in Los Angeles, holding teaching and clinical appointments at UCLA and USC and becoming chief of neurosurgery at Los Angeles County Harbor Hospital by 1949. During later stints at veterans hospitals in Pittsburgh and Salt Lake City, and the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Utah, he developed the use of ultrasound to perform bloodless brain surgery.

  “He was very good-looking as a younger man. He was a professional-class ballroom dancer, a wonderful dancer,” says Pia.

  We won contests together, and we had such fun. He also was a great skier—he took me skiing as a child. The myth is of “the interfering dentist.” The fact is, he was educated, [Ingrid] was not, though she was a gifted actress. And she was also [eight years] younger, and he was of the old-fashioned European stock who would try to protect her. But he was a Swede with an accent and not in that world or that business, so calling him “the interfering dentist” was a way of diminishing him.

  When Bergman’s contract came up with Selznick early in 1946, the producer thought Lindström’s demands were so exorbitant that both parties let the contract lapse; soon Bergman was bound for Broadway, anyway. Yet the critical and popular success of The Song of Bernadette, starring Selznick’s new protégée and future wife, Jennifer Jones, as well as the flurry of interest around Joan of Lorraine, made the Joan of Arc story a sought-after property. Selznick copyrighted the title Joan of Arc, assigned Ben Hecht to the script, and floated it as a possible production for Jones, who insisted (Selznick said) that he offer it to Bergman first. In England, the producer Gabriel Pascal tried to launch a screen version of Shaw’s Saint Joan with Deborah Kerr.

  Just when Selznick and Bergman dissolved their relationship, Fleming’s post–World War I acquaintance Wanger began to reorganize Walter Wanger Productions into a group of smaller companies, including the Diana Corporation (the director Fritz Lang, the writer Dudley Nichols, and the star Joan Bennett). With Wanger, Bergman formed the En Corporation (from the Swedish for “one”). Wanger hoped to snag Bergman for the lead in an adaptation of the British writer Rosamond Lehmann’s international best seller The Ballad and the Source. Lehmann’s novel spanned the Victorian and Edwardian eras, in Britain and in France; it told of a free-spirited woman’s determination to be true to her lovers as well as her children. Wanger touted the heroine’s “constant search for happiness and truth in a world shackled by the chains of a bigoted culture” and wooed Noël Coward for the screenplay. Wanger would later write that Bergman told him, “Walter, I could never play the part of a woman deserting her child and leaving her husband for someone else, because I could never do a thing like that.”

  In 1949, of course, Bergman would do that, for Roberto Rossellini. Pia says the humiliation her father endured from that public scandal and her mother’s other infidelities left lasting scars:

  I was a young woman, seventeen or eighteen, when my father told me how he felt about it. Years after, it affected him. It was so disturbing and painful to him that he couldn’t drive home after performing neurosurgery without stopping the car and getting sick by the side of the road. He felt shamed that it happened, and he wasn’t of the generation that thinks everything is easy, you go to therapy or counseling, you work it through, you get over it. That kind of grief was damaging to his self-esteem. And for it to happen again and again: he was not from that world in which everyone was having affairs, so he felt humiliated, publicly humiliated, even when he went to the hospital. Life took its toll on him.

  In January 1947, Anderson and Lindström had quarreled, and Bergman and Anderson had stopped talking to each other. The energetic Lindström negotiated for Bergman with Liberty Films, but turned Liberty down. “The good doctor is a hard man to do business with,” Liberty’s partner and producer Samuel Briskin told Bergman’s publicist, Joe Steele. “If he had his way there would be nothing left for us.” Bergman was getting tense with Lindström, too. “Business, business, it’s always business. How I feel doesn’t matter,” she vented to Steele. But Wanger secretly sympathized with her husband. He later told an interviewer that Ingrid “was always going off half-cocked, making crazy financial commitments, and he was the one who had to extricate her. She had bum judgments, phony enthusiasms.” After her triumph in Joan of Lorraine,Wanger said, she wrote him “that she was the happiest woman in the world and that, from now on, the theater was for her. But three months later, she was bored. She couldn’t wait to rush back to Hollywood.”

  During the run of Joan of Lorraine, Hollywood’s top filmmakers came to pay their respects at the Alvin Theater. The Liberty director George Stevens flew in to see the play and talk movie projects, but said his script was “not good enough for you and I won’t even tell you what it is.” (Instead of that comedy, Joseph Fields’s One Big Happy Family, Stevens filmed the hit Norwegian-immigrant play I Remember Mama with Irene Dunne.) When Bergman let it be known that she’d do a Joan film without using Anderson’s play, another Liberty director, William Wyler, began courting her and Lindström. Anderson thought his partnership with Bergman was through. He met with Jerry Wald of Warner Bros. to discuss a movie of Key Largo ( John Huston eventually made it, with Bogart and Bacall), and Wald pitched Joan of Lorraine as a possible star-making vehicle for Viveca Lindfors (who never became a star) or a comeback vehicle for Garbo.

  Wanger didn’t give up easily on his dream movie, The Ballad and the Source. He asked Fleming to see Bergman in January, not to consider Joan of Lorraine as a movie, but to pitch that novel again. Fleming was feeling unusually unmoored. Many of his friends—Hawks, Mahin, Gable—were in marital limbo or upheaval, and though his own daughters had anchored his life on Knapp Island and Moraga Drive, he’d begun to get bored or frustrated with Lu. “He used to pick on her terribly at the dinner table, and she’d go crying up to her bedroom,” says Victoria. “Mother told me that if Daddy had had two bourbons, she knew to watch it. I remember crawling under the bed one time because I was scared,” says Sally. He started monitoring Lu’s comings and goings, touching the hood of her car when he got home to see if it was warm.

  Professionally, Fleming had been unattached for the first time since 1932. Although
the deals with Vidor and Liberty didn’t pan out, his new adviser, Lew Wasserman, continued to nudge him away from the studios. (Wasserman soon pioneered the epochal arrangement that netted half the profits of Winchester ’73 for James Stewart.) Wanger, a literate independent with studio-sized dreams and a cosmopolitan background, who knew Fleming from his days as President Wilson’s cameraman, was a good fit for the director. Wanger enlisted him to bring a copy of Lehmann’s book to New York in hopes of hooking Bergman for the lead. Theaters usually go dark on Monday, but Joan of Lorraine took its day off on Sunday, instead, out of deference to a devout audience. At the Monday, January 27, performance, the actress who thought herself just part of another movie Fleming made five years earlier became the center of his career and his emotional life.

  Accounts conflict on just what happened next. In a publicity piece written for his byline, Fleming said he invited Bergman to lunch the next day and proclaimed, “Ingrid, you were magnificent! You ought to play Joan for the rest of your life.”

  But according to the publicist Steele,

  The white-maned lion stormed backstage and clamored to see her now, instantly. “Victor, Victor!” Ingrid cried out as they kissed and embraced with fervor.

  Words gushed from him in a violent torrent. “God damn it, Angel, why do you want to make a picture? You should play Joan for two years, ten years, all your life!” He grabbed her shoulders, held her off and gazed into her eyes. Tears streamed down the bronzed, part-Cherokee countenance.

  “I came here to talk to you about The Ballad and the Source—to hell with it, it’s a lot of junk! I don’t want to direct you or make pictures with you. God damn it, you belong here, out there on that stage!”

  “Oh, Victor! Victor!” she said, and they cried together.

  Only in Bergman’s version of events does Fleming sweep in, toss Lehmann’s novel in the corner of the dressing room, grab, embrace, and praise her, and then say, “You must play Joan on the screen.” For Bergman, “So there it was. The words I’d been waiting for as long as I could remember, certainly for the last six years since David Selznick said we were going to do it. I was so happy. At last it was serious.”

  Fleming called Wanger almost immediately to push Bergman as Joan, and his enthusiasm made Wanger move quickly. The next day Wanger phoned Anderson’s office to open discussions on optioning his stage work and hiring Anderson himself to do the film script that became Joan of Arc. Fleming was on the train to California, heading back to Moraga Drive to attend Victoria’s birthday. By the end of the week, Wanger and Fleming called Anderson to tell him they had a deal. Bergman was, as Anderson put it, “now 100 per cent on my side,” and even Petter put his weight behind the film. Anderson wrote in his diary, “Wonders will never cease.”

  Fleming wrote a letter to Bergman from California:

  This was in my pocket when I arrived. Several more I destroyed. The Lord only knows what is written here, and no doubt His mind is a little hazy because he had not a very firm grip upon me at the time I was writing—we were slightly on the “outs.” I was putting more trust in alcohol than in the Lord. And now I am putting all my trust in you when, without opening this, I send it, for you may think me very foolish.

  Then he folded another note inside the letter:

  Just a note to tell you dear—to tell you what? That it’s evening? That we miss you? That we drank to you? No—to tell you boldly like a lover that I love you—cry across the miles and hours of darkness that I love you—that you flood across my mind like waves across the sand. If you care—or if you don’t, these things to you with love I say. I am devotedly—your foolish—ME.

  With Bergman fever heating up both coasts, the star herself “wore a simple gray suit and the usual Bergman glow” at a February 2 bash thrown in her honor by the artist Bernard Lamotte at his Manhattan atelier, Dorothy Kilgallen reported. Fleming hustled back to New York on February 6. The next day Wanger announced that he’d hired the designer Richard Day for a screen version of Joan of Lorraine to star Bergman under Fleming’s direction. This public declaration had the desired effect of stomping out Pascal’s Saint Joan and nullifying Wyler. (Lindström turned him down formally on February 9; “William Wyler’s disappointed,” wrote Hedda Hopper on the nineteenth.) A note from Bergman to Anderson read simply, “Max—come to me!” She and the playwright “made up formally, with embraces,” he recorded. Anderson referred to Lindström as “the stupid ass” for wanting Walter Winchell to break the news of the film on his radio show. Louella Parsons was the columnist who did the honors. And Bergman announced that she would start the film as soon as the play’s run ended in May.

  The movie would be neither an En Corporation film nor a Walter Wanger picture but the product of a new entity, Sierra Pictures, whose principal corporate directors were Wanger, Fleming, and Bergman. Wanger was the biggest investor; he spent $50,000 of his own money for five thousand shares, purchased another forty thousand shares through Wanger Productions, and borrowed $200,000 to underwrite Bergman’s twenty thousand shares. Fleming was in for $150,000. All deferred the major portion of their production salaries. (Wanger had to finance the costs of script writing and preproduction.) In a letter to J. Arthur Rank two years later, Wanger commented, “As poor Victor Fleming used to say, ‘Everybody in Hollywood is worrying about making deals instead of making pictures.’ Never a truer word was said.” Joan of Arc was a gamble for all concerned. But they were each, in his or her way, fanatically devoted to the movie.

  Fleming plunged into independent filmmaking—but he may have had more power with his ironclad contract at MGM. He was about to experience the dangers a director faced outside the studio system when partners had their own strong ideas and the star system was ascendant. Wanger, an Anglophile, was so enamored of Laurence Olivier’s Henry V that he attempted to hire Olivier’s costume and set designer even before Sierra was legally established. When the craftsmen themselves weren’t available, Wanger tried to lease Henry V ’s sets and costumes.

  Still, Fleming should have been wary of Bergman. He was confident that he could direct her to a career-high performance. He didn’t recognize the destructive potential of her intense identification with the role. Wanger and Fleming ended up hiring Barbara Karinska as the costume designer and Dorothy Jeakins, then a sketch artist, as her associate. Bergman told Karinska her Joan should wear red, since a red skirt was common to Joan’s class and tradition held that she wore one when she made the rounds of French royalty. “What peasant wears red chiffon?” Karinska snapped. She had total faith in Fleming, not Bergman, even when Bergman was correct. (She did, in fact, wear red in the opening scenes.)

  This historical epic would be filmed without the years of planning that went into Gone With the Wind or even The Good Earth. Fleming had to hurry. He initially made his base at the Waldorf-Astoria; within days he relocated to a thirty-third-floor suite at the Hampshire House, eight floors above Bergman. Steele said he suggested the transfer “to better facilitate conferences with Ingrid.” (The $75-a-week rate put off the ever-practical Fleming; he managed to get a monthly deal.) As always a demon for physical authenticity (he shared that with Wanger), Fleming hired the costume artist Noel Howard, who sketched armor and period wear at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (a museum armorer would also work on the film). Then he commenced script prep with Anderson.

  The playwright didn’t realize—or was too sophisticated to record—that his director and star were having an affair. On February 8, when Fleming was still at the Waldorf, Anderson, who lived thirty-six miles north of Manhattan in New City, waited for the director to call him, then rung him up after midnight only to be told that Fleming was out. He concluded, “Probably Petter is kicking up some kind of hell-dust” on the phone from California and Fleming was sweeping away the fallout.

  “I didn’t like it,” Anderson wrote after Fleming trooped him and Bergman off to see Carl Dreyer’s Passion de Jeanne d’Arc at the Museum of Modern Art on Valentine’s Day. This compressed black
-and-white reenactment of Joan’s five cross-examinations, a masterpiece of the silent era, features a performance by Maria Falconetti as Joan that makes starkly physical the heroine’s tormented and exalted states of consciousness. It had little influence on Fleming, except in one regard. Dreyer shot most of the film in enormous close-ups. Fleming’s Joan of Arc would contain more sustained close-ups of Bergman than Hula or Mantrap did of Bow, The Wizard of Oz of Garland, Gone With the Wind of Leigh, or all of them combined. Unfortunately, this was infatuation, not direction.

  Fleming found himself at the center of the action on a high cultural level. He shot craps in his suite with Charles Boyer while John Steinbeck and Erich Maria Remarque discussed European politics. About ten days after the excursion to MoMA and following a week’s delay created by a heavy snowfall, Anderson had lunch with Bergman and Fleming at the Hampshire House. Bergman told him she wanted to sing for him, and picked his hit from Knickerbocker Holiday, “September Song.” But when Fleming listened to the lyrics about the “long, long while from May to December” (and the days growing short “when you reach September”), he knew she was singing the song for her lover and director. He had just turned fifty-eight; Bergman was thirty-one.