Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (101 page)

422
“It had three endings”: Trumbo interview with J. D. Marshall, Dec. 1973, Phoenix House, Tempe, Arizona, Recorded Sound Reference Center, Library of Congress.

422
six
endings: The original in the treatment, the two endings that were filmed, and Trumbo’s wordless version, plus two additional ones. In the first of Trumbo’s final unused endings, Dorinda radios the airfield for
landing
instructions, adding, “And if Lt. Ted Randall is still there, tell him I’d like to talk to him about a new assignment.” Smiling “gaily,” she adds, “Something we might do together.” In the second, a note of inappropriate humor goes to Pete, who watches Dorinda run to Ted after she lands the bomber, then says quietly to himself, “That’s my boy . . . that’s my girl . . . and four million bucks!” He follows that with “a little whistle to emphasize his awe.”

422
In a proposal: Agee’s memo to his
Life
editors appears in Wranovics’s
Chaplin and Agee.
Agee had been intending to do a story on a representative Hollywood director. “[John] Huston could be the director story we discussed,” he tells his editors. “But I suggest that he’s worth a story to himself and that the director should be a medium-talented reliable journeyman, not so far above the average as Huston, Ford, Wyler, & such. Say, a good director like Victor Fleming.” Agee’s middling-positive estimation of Fleming may reflect the director’s uneven output during Agee’s years as a reviewer for
Time
and the
Nation,
1942–48.

422
“The picture will serve”: Agee,
Agee on Film.

422
“The emotions a ghost”: Ibid.

422
“American inventiveness”: Eisenstein,
Beyond the Stars.

422
“the chain of experience”: The French edition of
Eisenstein’s Memoirs
(
Mémoires 2
[Paris: Union Génerale d’Éditions, 1980]) from the chapter “Judith.” The critic and film historian Ian Christie, co-editor with Richard Taylor of
Eisenstein Rediscovered,
supplied these pages. (Translated by Elizabeth Anthony.)

423
“What I don’t know”:
Los Angeles Examiner,
Jan. 13, 1943.

423
“A very dour, sort of dry”: Vidor interview, 1971, which contains the full story of the 1944 road trip, UCLA. Olivia de Havilland’s comments are in a 2003 letter to Kurt Jensen.

27 A Confounding Political Life

425
laying down bets: Mankiewicz told this story to Selden West while she was researching the life of Spencer Tracy. Fleming was not, however, a member of the isolationist group America First.

425
registered as a Democrat: Lu Fleming always registered Republican, as did Fleming’s mother.

426
“He was against”: Kazan,
Life.

426
“I have no use for a poor man”: Steele,
Ingrid Bergman.

427
“It was officially non-political”: Dunne,
Take Two.

429
“persons in the various studios”: Richard B. Hood, Special Agent in Charge, Los Angeles FBI bureau, to FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, Feb. 9, 1944, MPA file. Hood, an FBI agent from 1934 to 1953, died in 2005, age ninety-seven. Federal Bureau of Investigation: File on the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.

429
one notable misstep: In August 1938, James B. Matthews, a former Communist Party member who was the committee’s star witness, named Temple as a communist dupe because she, along with Clark Gable, Robert Taylor, and James Cagney, had sent congratulatory wires to the French communist newspaper
Ce Soir.
Matthews—who coined the term “fellow traveler”—went on to declare (in a statement reported by newspapers but expunged from the official HUAC transcript), “In fact, almost everyone in Hollywood has been signed up for some communist front organization except Mickey Mouse and Snow White.” To that, Alabama representative Joe Starnes inquired, “What about Charlie McCarthy?”

429
the FBI estimated that 200: Hood to Hoover, March 22, 1944, FBI, MPA file.

429
James Kevin McGuinness: Born in Ireland, he was a close friend of John Ford’s. In 1940, he married his second wife, the German baroness Lucie von Ledermann-Wartburg. He was ousted from MGM in 1949 in a restructuring blamed on the studio’s declining box-office returns, although fervent anticommunists claimed it was retaliation for his MPA activities. He went on a three-month national speaking tour on the communist threat, wrote
Rio Grande
for Ford, then died of a heart attack in 1950, age fifty-six.

430
“He was such a charming man”: Ceplair and Englund,
Inquisition in Hollywood.

430
“did me harm”: Vidor interview, 1971, UCLA.

430
“banned for being anti-Semitic”: McGuinness, Mahin, and Howard Emmett Rogers had been tagged in print as anti-Semites in January 1941 when the
Daily Worker
observed them at the Brown Derby discussing “aliens” in Hollywood and attacking the forthcoming
Citizen Kane
with G. Allison Phelps, a virulently anti-Semitic broadcaster and pamphleteer. Phelps discussed that meeting on a subsequent broadcast on KMTR. But Vidor probably was thinking of a mass booklet mailing from the Council of Hollywood Guilds and Unions shortly after the MPA began. As noted in a memo from Hood to Hoover on September
13
, 1944, the booklet accused the MPA “of having been sympathetic to the German-American Bund, implying connections with Father Coughlin’s Christian Front, the Ku Klux Klan, Gerald L. K. Smith [a notoriously anti-Semitic minister and agitator for right-wing causes], Joe McWilliams [head of the anti-Semitic Christian Organizers], and those individuals now on trial in Washington, D.C., for sedition.”
Communist Activity in the Entertainment Industry: FBI Surveillance Files on Hollywood, 1942–1958.

430
“What are they for, King?”: Schwartz,
Hollywood Writers’ Wars.

431
“Possibly nowhere but in Hollywood”:
New Republic,
June 26, 1944.

431
“more words than any other author”:
Los Angeles Times,
July 5, 1938.

431
“beginning to show left-wing tendencies”: Hood to Hoover, Feb. 18, 1943, in
Communist Activity in the Entertainment Industry.

431
“If trying to be”: Hedda Hopper column, May 6, 1944.

432
“You should avoid”: Hoover to Hood, May 1, 1944. FBI, MPA file.

432
straight out of law school: After leaving the FBI at the end of the war, Baumeister was general counsel for KTTV in Los Angeles.

432
“a possible Communist front”: Hood to Hoover, Feb. 18, 1943. An informant added, “There is very little doubt that the inspiration for the creation of the Hollywood Canteen originated in communist circles,”
Communist Activity in the Entertainment Industry.

432
Maribess Stokes: Hood to Hoover, July 14, 1944. Ibid. Stokes was married to a Navy officer. She sometimes was named in FBI memos as Mary Bess Stokes. FBI memos do not indicate that she was prosecuted, but further information about her has eluded inquiry.

432
“to recover all copies”: D. M. Ladd to Hoover, July 9, 1945. Ibid. On July 14, Ladd filled in the rest of the story in response to Hoover’s request, explaining that Stokes “admitted” on October 18, 1944, that she had been securing FBI materials through Lieutenant Daniel Goodykoontz, and that the agent Hood had discussed the matter with commanders of the Los Angeles ONI office. This was done, Ladd reminded Hoover, “in accordance with your instructions that the situation be adjusted on a local level before it was taken up with Naval Intelligence at the seat of government.” In other words, Hoover, who was renowned for his skill as a bureaucratic infighter, had asked that the matter be handled quietly, lest it become known not only that the FBI had shared documents but that a security breach had occurred. In addition to Wood, a memo from L. B. Nichols to Clyde Tolson on November 10, 1944, indicates that Lela Rogers said that she, too, had seen the FBI’s list of Hollywood communists.

432
Goodykoontz was transferred: In the 1950s, Goodykoontz helped prosecute the gangster Mickey Cohen for tax evasion. Says Bill Goodykoontz, “My father always spoke positively about his time in Iceland, so the suggestion that he was banished there surprises both me and my mother.”

433
“We even know their [party] card numbers”: Ibid.

434
“The attacks against the MPA”: Hood to Hoover, March 22, 1944. FBI, MPA file.

434
In February 1944: Ibid.

434
“I have got a bunch”: Ibid.

434
“Selznick spent the evening”: Ibid.

434
[name redacted]: An appeal to the FBI to uncover the names was turned down. The FBI still classifies the long-defunct Motion Picture Alliance under “domestic terrorism.”

435
“pretty intelligent”: An Oral History with Robert Vogel. Interviewed by Barbara Hall. Beverly Hills, CA: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 1991. Margaret Herrick Library.

28 One Last
Adventure
at MGM

436
“It has been said”: Hood to Hoover, May 10, 1944. FBI, MPA file.

436
“Put them wise”: Hood to Hoover, May 24, 1944. Ibid.

437
“a studio plot”: Beauchamp,
Without Lying Down.

437
vehicle for Spencer Tracy:
The New York Times,
Aug. 28, 1941.

437
Fleming’s contract: MGM legal files.

437
“You felt like you built the buildings”: Vidor interview, 1971, UCLA. Vidor was often of two minds when discussing his friend Fleming. Sometimes he told interviewers Fleming would mutter “Happy days” as a put-down of anyone he didn’t see at work on the set; at other times, the phrase was a wistful expression of Fleming’s longing for the relaxed atmosphere of shooting on location, away from the studio.

438
“gave no indication”: MGM legal files.

438
“If you ask us”:
The New York Times,
Feb. 8, 1946.

438
“It has everything except Little Eva”:
Chicago Tribune,
March 9, 1946.

439
“When he spit out the mouthwash”: Gable had finally learned the foul smell of his false teeth was turning off his on-screen love mates. On Sept. 9, 1991, Anthony Bushell wrote to Michael Dempsey of Leigh’s experience with Gable on
Gone With the Wind:
“She regards her celebrated partner with only the ghostliest touch of the disapproval she
couldn’t
help feeling for him. It was the old question of BREATH and its unacceptability, and Vivien figured he had been in pictures long enough and played opposite enough outspoken colleagues to have done something about it.” David Stenn collection.

441
“was jittery”:
Los Angeles Times,
June 14, 1945.

441
“The trouble was”: Louella O. Parsons, “Mister ‘King,’ ”
Photoplay,
Nov. 1947.

442
“Gable’s back”: The anecdote of Torchia coming up with the slogan and winning $250 is from her interview in the Ronald L. Davis Oral History Collection, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, collection number A1980.0154; viewed at Margaret Herrick Library.

442
Garson didn’t prefer: Troyan,
Rose for Mrs. Miniver.

442
“He’d look at her”: Warren G. Harris,
Gable.

442
“definitely the worst picture”: Clyde Brion Davis to David Brion Davis, March 31, 1946, collection of David Brion Davis. Before he finally saw the picture at a theater in upstate New York, Davis joked to his son, “I hear it isn’t so hot, but there’ll be a newsreel.”

443
producer’s contract: MGM legal files.

443
“a nice group”: Dowd and Shepherd,
King Vidor.

444
“were motivated by personal jealousy”: Hood to Hoover, July 14, 1944. FBI, MPA file.

444
Never a well-liked figure: Herman Mankiewicz said of Revnes, “His job, in the event he sees a glacier moving down Washington Boulevard, is to apprise Louis B. Mayer of the fact with all possible speed” (Hoopes,
Cain
).

444
“everybody was out for himself”: Eyman,
Lion of Hollywood.

29 Ingrid Bergman and
Joan of Arc

446
the American public condemned her: Two weeks after giving birth to Roberto Ingmar Rossellini in March 1950, before getting a divorce from Lindström, Bergman was condemned on the floor of the U.S. Senate by Senator Edwin Johnson of Colorado as “a free-love cultist” and called one of “Hollywood’s two current apostles of degradation.” (The other was Rita Hayworth.) Earlier that year, citing “exhibitor resistance,” the Motion Picture Association of America also ordered the excision of a
Joan of Arc
clip from an advertising short about history in films. After
separating
from Roberto Rossellini in 1956, Bergman made a triumphant return to American movies with
Anastasia,
for which she won her second Academy Award. In 1972, Senator Charles Percy of Illinois apologized for Johnson’s attack and called her “a true star in every sense of the word.” Bergman won her third Oscar in 1975 in the supporting actress category for
Murder on the Orient Express.
She died on her sixty-seventh birthday in 1982.