Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  Fleming was in thrall to Bergman. Yousuf Karsh had printed up a portrait of Bergman for Steele, who hung it on his wall. When Fleming saw it, he took it. “Marvelous, just marvelous!” he exclaimed. “I’ve got to have it—it’s mine!” Steele tried explaining it was unique and made for him. “You can’t have it, Joe,” Fleming insisted. “It belongs to me now.” And he sped away with it.

  John Lee Mahin’s now estranged wife, Patsy Ruth Miller, got what was going on when she lunched with Vic at the Hampshire House:

  I had assumed that we’d meet in the lobby and lunch in the restaurant, but when I called to tell him I was there, he told me to come up to his room. It was a suite, actually; a living room and two bedrooms. And guess who was there when I entered—Ingrid Bergman, looking very poised and beautiful. It was our first meeting and I was thrilled because I was a great admirer of hers. Victor said we would have luncheon served there as Ingrid didn’t want to appear in public; we could have a nice cozy chat without being interrupted by fans and autograph hunters. That certainly made sense. But it was hard to have a nice cozy chat under the circumstances.

  Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a director having lunch with his star in his hotel suite, but when it’s fairly evident that it was not only his, it was also hers . . . it’s a bit awkward to talk about the old days back home. Victor knew that I was separated from my husband, John, and I knew that he was cheating on his wife. So we skirted around the subject of the old days in California and we made inane remarks about New York weather, about how the [USC] Trojans were doing, about God knows what. The most trivial of trivia. We parted with many assurances that we would get together again, but, of course, we never did.

  Never appearing romantic in public, Vic and Ingrid were old-school discreet. But when Bergman’s husband arrived without warning on February 28, Lindström’s own discretion shredded theirs. Rather than meet her in her dressing room, Lindström went directly to the Hampshire House and waited in the lobby. After her performance that night, Fleming and Bergman had gone to 21. Bergman told Steele, “When we came to the hotel we went directly to the elevator. I said, ‘Let me come up for a little while. I don’t feel a bit sleepy!’ ” She didn’t spot her husband sitting by himself in the lobby. And he didn’t want to intrude on whatever he sensed was happening between Fleming and his wife.

  Already, Petter and Ingrid’s marriage had been turbulent. Petter had recently gotten wind of Bergman’s affair with the celebrated war photographer (and womanizer) Robert Capa when the three were vacationing on the Sun Valley, Idaho, slopes. Capa’s easy intimacy with Bergman and an impolitic remark he made about seeing her in New York suggested that their relationship transcended friendship—and Bergman didn’t deny it. But, in Bergman’s telling of the episode, when Lindström requested a divorce, she told him that she and Capa were through. And Bergman was sincere, writing Ruth Roberts that she and Capa had made “a clean operation so that both patients will live happily ever after.”

  Now, in Fleming, Lindström found a new and at least equally formidable rival staying with her in New York.

  The morning after Lindström sighted Ingrid and Vic at the hotel, Joe Steele woke up to a phone call from Fleming in full bray:

  “Joe! Goddamn it, who are you that you shouldn’t be disturbed in the morning?”

  Fleming’s voice boomed against my ear like a trumpet blast.

  “What’s the matter? Can’t you sleep?”

  “Sleep, hell! You turned out to be a fine friend . . .”

  “Hey, wait a minute—What’s eating you, Victor?”

  “Why didn’t you let me or somebody know that Petter was coming?”

  “Petter? What are you talking about?”

  “Didn’t you know that he was coming in last night?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Well, damn it, he did. Ingrid didn’t know he was coming, either. He went to her room and when he didn’t find her there, he called me. It was damn near two o’clock. ‘This is Petter,’ he said. ‘May I speak to Ingrid?’ Damn embarrassing, that’s what it was.”

  “Then what?”

  “She got on the phone and told him she’d be right down. Pretty rough, my friend. Pretty rough.”

  When Steele and Bergman walked to the theater that night, he responded to her rare silence by saying, “Victor called me this morning and told me what happened last night. I want you to know I had no idea Petter was flying in.” Bergman said, “I am just sorry for Victor. He was terribly embarrassed.”

  Anderson cryptically noted Lindström’s appearance at a script meeting in Fleming’s suite the next day: “No fireworks.” For a man like Fleming, who treasured privacy and his own brand of honor, such an encounter would be deeply jarring. He managed to funnel any anger, remorse, or anxiety into revising the script. Fleming, Lindström, and Anderson gathered in early March, but the meeting broke up because of a snowstorm. In his own gentlemanly way, Fleming hectored Anderson about the writing; they and Bergman met to go over revisions. On March 19, Anderson recorded that Fleming “compressed the siege of Orléans.” Fleming returned to California on the twenty-third. Boarding the 20th Century Limited to Chicago, he called Bergman during his change of trains to the Santa Fe Super Chief. En route to California, he wrote a letter that he mailed upon arrival.

  Dear and darling Angel.

  How good to hear your voice. How tongue-tied and stupid I become. How sad for you. Then when you put the phone down, the click is like a bullet. Dead silence. Numbness and then thoughts. Thoughts that beat like drums upon my brain. My heart, my brain. I hate and loathe both. How they hurt and torment me—pain my flesh and bones. When they have had their fill of that, they quarrel and fight each other. My brain beats my heart into a great numbness. Then my brain pounds my heart to death. All this I can do nothing about.

  In Arabian Nights it says: “Do what thy manhood bids thee do. From none but self expect applause. He best lives and noblest dies, who makes and keeps his self-made laws.”

  Time stopped when I got aboard that train. It became dark and in the darkness I was lost. Why I did not think to do some drinking I don’t know. I went to bed for fourteen hours and I slept fourteen minutes, forgot to order breakfast on the Century, and had no food or coffee until 1 p.m. That much I remember. Someone met me at the train. I’m very much afraid she found me crying. A hundred years old and crying over a girl. I said, “There’s no fool like an old fool.”

  The first Antoinette Perry Awards (or Tonys) were given on April 6—Easter Sunday. So it was either sacrilegious or fortuitous that Ingrid Bergman was one of two best-actress winners that year; the other was Helen Hayes, who presented the younger woman with the award.

  Anderson enjoyed listening to Ingrid and Sam Wanamaker on the radio that night, but found writing the script a long haul. From the moment the movie became a real possibility, it was conceived as a straightforward historical drama, not a Pirandello-cum-Brecht hybrid like the play, and even though he’d worked on major movies years before, the scope of this epic was formidable. Attached to a package of revisions he sent Easter weekend, he wrote, “Just how long it’s going to take to finish, I can’t be sure. I’m trying to cover ground fast so that you’ll have a script to work from. At the same time I’m trying to do a good job, and so I can’t hurry too much.” Anderson did relax for a few hours and paid a congratulatory call to Bergman and the cast at the Alvin on April 11. Three days later Wanger fired off a telegram asking Anderson to move to California forthwith. Wanger might have made the call, but Fleming’s dissatisfaction fueled it. To Ingrid, Vic wrote:

  Angel:

  About the script. It is not good. Much too long. Max has not done what he said, has not stayed on the story line, keeps on Joan of Lorraine. What’s wrong? Walter Wanger and I have talked to several writers—we are going to put someone on at once. Yesterday I spent with Walter trying to bring him up to date on the story and the business. Today I came to the Roach studio. Our gang are all hard worke
rs, like beavers, and all seem happy. Monday we have—or rather you have our new corporation business manager to see. He comes very well recommended having had charge of Columbia Studios. Walter and I hope he will keep the Corp on their toes and get the picture started on time.

  Angel—Angel—why didn’t I get a chain three thousand miles long with a good winding device on the end. Better quit now before I start telling you I love you—telling you Angel I love you—yes—yes—yes—it’s ME.

  Bergman saved her frank reactions for notes back west to her friend Roberts:

  I get so angry when I read Fleming’s letters. He seems to have to spend day after day with business people; everyone trying to find out where and how to get the last dollar out of the picture. I know Victor has talked business much more than story, but it is important I guess to get these things organized after all. He said, last time we spoke on the phone, that now he is only concentrating on story . . . I’ll be the bridge for everyone who wants to come to Victor with ideas. Don’t think for a moment I believe I can turn Victor round my little finger, but I’ll try to talk like an angel, be strong like a god, and dangerous like a devil. Forward my friends. Now starts the battle for Joan!

  Though Bergman quotes Fleming’s letters in My Story, they are not in her collected papers at Wesleyan University; her letters to him, which he tied up in ribbons, didn’t survive his death. Sally recalls her mother telling her father that she’d found the letters. He snapped, “I am aware of your awareness.” Lu mentioned the contents of just one of them. She told Sally, “Ingrid wrote that she adored [him] so much she’d gladly sleep in some hay—or whatever you call those things you keep hay in—at the foot of his bed.”

  On Anderson’s first day back in Los Angeles, when he still had the energy to fulminate over an improperly worded press release, Fleming took the playwright to dinner at Wanger’s house and introduced him to the screenwriter Andrew Solt. Since the war ended, Solt was on a hot streak that included a hit comedy, Without Reservations (1946), starring John Wayne and Claudette Colbert, for the director Mervyn LeRoy. In the course of that movie, Colbert’s character, the author of a visionary and best-selling novel, was dubbed a contemporary Joan of Arc, and the search for an actor to play her hero was compared to Selznick’s hunt for Scarlett O’Hara.

  Whether any of that caught Fleming’s attention, Solt was the man he hired to help Anderson learn (or relearn) the ropes of movie writing. (In the early sound era, Anderson had written All Quiet on the Western Front and Rain.) Solt earned his equal credit, and the two writers, and Fleming, had an amiable partnership, despite some obvious miscues between Anderson and his director. Anderson thought Fleming “agreed to the opening.” That would have meant using actual voices for the saints, as Anderson had done on the stage. If Fleming entertained the notion of keeping the voices, it was because of The Song of Bernadette, which both pictured Bernadette’s vision of the Virgin Mary (an uncredited Linda Darnell) and gave the Virgin a voice.

  Indeed, on April 25, Fleming arranged for Anderson to screen The Song of Bernadette to see how a tale of tested faith, hinging on several rigorous cross-examinations, could have some narrative urgency to it. But Bernadette was about a very different country girl, halting and sickly, whose holiness became the foundation of a controversial healing shrine in France; the movie’s modest, respectful approximation of her visions gave her sanctity much-needed dramatic credibility. Joan of Arc was about a heroine who spoke forthrightly and sometimes merrily of Saint Michael, Saint Catherine, and Saint Margaret and who succeeded in inspiring followers as long as she projected certainty. No wonder that in Joan of Lorraine, Masters, the director, complains about how difficult it is to get the voices right. As part of the straight-arrow big-screen narrative of Joan of Arc, it’s hard to see how a director as tough, precise, and down-to-earth as Fleming could have gotten them right without shading into fantasy, horror, or bizarre comedy.

  In his first pass at the script, Anderson simply lifted lines from the play as if they would work devoid of their old context. If he’d had his way, Saint Catherine would still have hectored Joan that it’s been “four years since you heard our Voices first in your garden. And you have not yet begun what you must do.” Well, what was it they wanted a girl to do? In Anderson’s initial version, Saint Margaret provided the answer: “You must go to Sir Robert de Baudricourt and he will give you escort to the Dauphin. You will rescue France from the English and crown the Dauphin at Rheims [sic].” Happily, as filmed, this mission statement plays out across Bergman’s face while a narrator summarizes her vision. And the Roger Wagner Chorale and the singing of eighteen-year-old Marni Nixon augment Bergman’s wonder-struck reactions with their holy warbling. Nixon would go on to sing for Deborah Kerr in The King and I and for Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady; a fourteen-year-old Marilyn Horne stood next to Nixon, and later dubbed the movie “a disaster.”

  Fleming engaged yet another writer, Laurence Stallings, on April 26; Stallings had co-authored the 1924 play What Price Glory with Anderson, and Fleming thought he could pitch in on the battle scenes. Sadly, whatever rapport Anderson and Stallings shared in the 1920s had vanished. Anderson referred to him as “a headache” and chalked up Stallings’s knowledge of medieval warfare to reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s White Company.

  Fleming relieved his own stress with civilian sport flying, which had become legal again in early November. He applied for a student license, bought a tiny Navion two-seater, and, the following April, passed his licensing flight test in Burbank. Charles Cotton’s son—Charles Cotton Jr.—remembers flying to the Mojave Desert with his wife, Audrey, as well as with his dad and Fleming. They landed near a dive that the older men deemed unsuitable for the younger Cotton’s spouse. It was the barnstorming female pilot Pancho Barnes’s rowdy Happy Bottom Riding Club—the watering hole made famous in the book and film of The Right Stuff. (Barnes’s biographer states that this colorful aerialist deserved partial credit for the script of Test Pilot; there’s no evidence for that claim, and it fits the pattern of friends horning in on Fleming’s successes.)

  On May 11, the day after Joan of Lorraine closed in New York, Bergman returned to California. Consultations with Anderson began immediately, and the playwright swiftly grew exasperated, even depressed. He couldn’t lick the opening scene, which Bergman disliked; he couldn’t deliver the pastoral scene Fleming wanted and simply “gave it up.” On May 13, according to his diary, “Vic wanted Voices out”—and when Anderson talked to the star about it, he was chagrined to find “she wants Voices out,” too. The next day, at her first preproduction meeting, Anderson found Bergman “very simple and gracious.”

  Stallings, however, in 1950, depicted everything negatively. From that initial meeting, Stallings wrote, “it was plain that Miss Bergman was not going to do Anderson’s play. She was going to do Ingrid Bergman’s play, not yet written, about Joan of Arc. This was not only a whacking surprise, but a very great pity. Do not think that Miss Bergman was the ordinary run-of-the-mill piece of temperament who wanted to have her own way. On the contrary, she approached the work with the deepest humility, the utmost desire to do the right thing. Soon, there came as many days of debate as there were in Joan’s own days.” (Of course, he was writing for an audience that had already condemned Bergman for her adultery and out-of-wedlock pregnancy with Rossellini.)

  “It was like being back in the Middle Ages,” wrote Stallings. Actually, it was like a vision of Hollywood yet to come, when superstars wielded unprecedented power as the most dependable draws in the business and the bosses of their own production companies. Fleming had been thought of as a wily pro able to get the best out of a variety of stars. But having Bergman as his business and love partner as well as his marquee player must have rattled him.

  It didn’t help that Anderson, the man with the most stubborn artistic conscience on this project, was uncomfortable with the screenwriting form and producing prosaic results. Fleming complained that Anderson kept getting stuck
on his old work in Joan of Lorraine. The playwright set the nettlesome voices in a sheepcote where Joan was tending to a sick little “ramkin”; Anderson was analogizing her to King David, the shepherd summoned by God’s own voice to rule Israel. But Bergman’s objection to the voices, and Vic’s, grew into a dislike for everything about the scene.

  In My Story, Bergman depicted the success of Joan of Lorraine as a result of her cajoling Anderson into revising his modern/medieval structure to incorporate more of her favorite lines and episodes from the life of the saint. Joan of Arc would be even more her movie than Joan of Lorraine was her play, and her view of Anderson’s intransigence or film incompetence led her to draft some scenes herself, further alienating the playwright. (It may not have helped Anderson in Bergman’s eyes that Ruth Roberts’s brother, George Seaton, had written the script to an unsuccessful film based on Anderson’s Eve of St. Mark.)

  On June 5, Anderson wrote in his diary, “I told Ingrid if the sheep-cote went out, I’d quit.” His partnership with Solt became a creative refuge. Solt liked the new trial and execution scenes, Anderson noted, and “says I’ve learned to write for pictures—or am learning.” But the issues of the voices and the sheepcote scene rankled Anderson, and on June 11 he told Wanger that “if it turned out we were doing a child’s Joan out of Ingrid’s little book [Willard Trask’s 1936 Joan of Arc: Self Portrait], I wouldn’t be likely to write it. Said I wouldn’t rock the boat at the moment.”