Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (11 page)

Young women from Barnard happened by now and then, but the U.S. School of Military Cinematography was a wholesome enclave at the edge of a New York scene heady with its own exploding cultural vitality. This was a time when Broadway was considered a barbaric camp at the barricades of proper etiquette and study. A contemporary music professor at Columbia, Daniel Gregory Mason, complained that “Jewish tastes and standards, with their Oriental extravagance, their sensual brilliance and intellectual facility and superficiality,” had corrupted Broadway. But Broadway hadn’t yet infiltrated Mason’s—and Carl Gregory’s—campus. Sintzenich’s diary entries of his time at Columbia read like a training camp fit for Fairbanks. Calisthenics and military drill followed reveille; then it was time for practice with twin
semaphore
flags and the single-flag signaling system known as wigwag. The cinematographers scrimmaged on Columbia’s football field between afternoon classes and lectures on cameras and lighting, fitness and health. For a bit of spice, female instructors taught French. To conserve time, Central Park, rather than nearby Army schools of fire, hosted semaphore classes as well as field trips that were meant to echo battlefield conditions.

Even the boys’ nights out were salubrious. On March 13, Sintzenich recorded, “In the evening went down to the Strand with Wruggles [Wesley Ruggles] and Fleming to see Mary Pickford.” The film was
Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley.
It must have been a kick for Fleming to watch his pal Fairbanks’s paramour, Pickford, as directed by his even older buddy Marshall Neilan. The next week Hal and Vic plunked down their money to see “Terrible Teddy” Tetzlaff’s onetime co-star Mabel Normand at the height of her comic-dramatic prowess in
The Floor Below.

On March 28, Sintzenich sketched a vignette of Manhattan hospitality that transports a reader to a more formal, gracious time. “Arrangements were made for the company to go to the theatre tonight and a supper after, of which about 100 took advantage . . . We went down in formation.” The image of a hundred men in uniform marching seventy blocks to see a hit Broadway musical, Sigmund Romberg’s
Maytime,
seems something out of
Yankee Doodle Dandy.
But it happened, and Fleming was part of it. (The following month the Columbia soldiers regrouped to see Al Jolson in
Sinbad.
)

Fleming got his lieutenant’s commission and an assignment that sent him briefly to Washington, D.C., on May 13. His mother, vacationing in Long Beach, California, mailed him a postcard that elicited a revealing response. “How do you like eating everywhere and anywhere?” he wrote his mother on May 22.

I have been doing it for so long now that it’s hard to imagine any other way—and it looks as though I shall be eating that way for some time.
But
some day I am going to have a house in California—wife and all that goes with it. That will be much better. I am going back to Columbia University tomorrow. Have finished my work here. It’s fearful hot in Washington. Would hate to have to stay here all summer . . . It’s much better to be an officer than a private. You are somebody and have
liberties—
live like a regular human being. Never felt better and had less in my life.

Of course, almost any man, even one who signed his name as an “affectionate son,” would be circumspect about love and marriage when writing to his mother. But bringing up having a house and wife in California without mentioning Clara, whom he’d divorced for desertion just three years earlier, suggests that Fleming was capable of ruthless movement in his emotional life. His ex-lovers would always speak well of him, but not his wives. Clara Strouse is a silent part of Fleming family history. By 1918, she presumably had died; her memory seems to have expired before her. Fleming’s second marriage, fifteen years hence, would be rife with oddly mixed emotions.

One friend he made at Columbia, Carl Akeley, would affect him as much as Fairbanks. “Akeley’s talents were spread across so many fields that he deserves the rank of Renaissance Man,” wrote Kevin Brown-low. In 1886, practicing a unique version of taxidermy that became state-of-the-art, Akeley stuffed P. T. Barnum’s elephant Jumbo. He became devoted to Africa and its animals and befriended another lover of the Dark Continent, Theodore Roosevelt. He survived a bull-elephant trampling and killed a leopard with his own two hands. He was a sculptor, naturalist, wildlife photographer, conservationist, and creator of the compressed-air cement gun. He invented the gyroscopic Akeley camera, capable of fluid movement in any direction and at any tempo.

While his cameras were being used for aerial reconnaissance and he was attached to the Corps of Engineers, Akeley improved searchlights and remote-control devices for light projectors and placed his evolving photographic designs at the disposal of the Signal Corps. In early May, Fleming and others accompanied Akeley and Signal Corps equipment inspectors to perform tests on Akeley’s new “pancake” camera, lightweight and popular with newsreel photographers, and the next month Fleming started teaching an advanced class in its use.

As Fleming put it in
Action,
around the same time “some letters reached me from California advising that someone had been conducting a strangely thorough investigation into my record. A few days later, I received orders to report to General [Marlborough] Churchill, commanding [the Military Intelligence Division] in Washington.” The Army was appropriating the new lieutenant so he could perform classi
fied
and experimental duties. A group called the American Protective League conducted the investigation of Fleming’s “loyalty, integrity and character” in June. Established by the Department of Justice in 1917 and lasting until 1919, the APL was manned by as many as 250,000 civilian secret agents. They were supposed to report suspicious activity, conduct interrogations, and make arrests. But when there wasn’t enough to keep them occupied, they turned in draft dodgers and maintained surveillance on industrial plants with defense contracts. They also raided German-language newspapers.

Called upon for testimonials to his patriotism and character, Fleming showed himself to be a savvy young man on the rise, naming half a dozen people on the basis of their clout and celebrity more than their knowledge of his character. Under the category noted on the form as “known by,” he listed his friend and sometime employer Charles Cotton; the Los Angeles city official Glen MacWilliams Sr., father of the Fairbanks cameraman Glen MacWilliams Jr.; and, of course, Fairbanks. Under “recommended by” (meaning they wrote letters and/or were interviewed directly on Fleming’s behalf), Fairbanks topped the list. The others never again show up in Fleming’s story, but they included Jules Brulatour, who inspired the opera-impresario segment of
Citizen Kane,
and Donald J. Bell, who co-founded Bell & Howell. Brulatour distributed raw film stock for Eastman Kodak, a key position in the photo industry; he was also an occasional producer and later the agent for the actress Hope Hampton, his second wife. Brulatour gave Fleming a letter of recommendation. In a follow-up interview he said, “Fleming is very intelligent, bright, and I think he would be a very valuable man as a moving picture photographer for the government.” He added he knew Fleming “three years in a business way only,” and “whether he would make a good officer or not for the Army, I am somewhat doubtful . . . Regarding his patriotism, I do not know him well enough to speak, as I have not been in touch with him lately.”

Bell, who said he had known Fleming a little over two years, had no qualms, calling the lieutenant “very, very patriotic . . . absolutely an American straight through.” He even backed up Fleming’s contention in
Action
that he had “been very anxious to get into the aviation service.” But just how well he knew Fleming is debatable. The APL delegate writes, “Mr. Fleming’s people are from Oklahoma, he thinks. Mr. Fleming’s father [Sid Deacon] is interested in oil properties out there.”

Fairbanks, then on the West Coast (Fleming had supplied an East
Coast
address), appears to be the sole source for a Los Angeles report that lauds Fleming’s mechanical facility but says he “expressed considerable dislike over the prospect of being drafted, stating that he hated to be taken from his work just at a time when he was making good. When [Fleming was] recently interviewed, however, by Douglas Fairbanks in New York after having entered the service, he stated that he was supremely happy and well satisfied with his lot. That he wouldn’t get out of it for anything in the world.” The investigator’s signature at the bottom of the report belongs to Cecil B. DeMille, the head of Hollywood’s APL chapter. The shadow of DeMille and the American Protective League would loom throughout Fleming’s life, to the formation of the anticommunist Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals in the 1940s.

One of Fleming’s first confidential assignments was shooting high-speed movies of exploding ordnance at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. He noted in
Action
that “it was delicate business and we soon learned that a charge of TNT can be as unruly at the starting point as it is on landing.” If you believe an earlier account of his life, he learned all about dynamite in San Dimas.

Fleming underwent the security check so he could chronicle comings and goings at the port of Hoboken, New Jersey, where three million doughboys eventually shipped out to Europe. He ended up spending much of his war time in Hoboken. It was an important post. In 1914, seventeen German ships had been stopped and kept at the port under harbor neutrality acts, and the government had maintained rigid control of it ever since, seizing the piers outright when America entered the war. Naming Hoboken a port of embarkation, the United States put part of the city under martial law and shuttered all saloons within a half mile.

For a young cinematographer with a knack for kinetic imagery and an appetite for power, filming the troops assembling at Camp Merritt, New Jersey, boarding a ferry at Alpine Landing, and then debarking at Hoboken must have been a pleasure as well as a duty. (Fleming’s footage is preserved at the National Archives.) A real-life cast of thousands provided him with a charge that may have rivaled assisting Griffith with the Babylonian hordes of
Intolerance.
Fleming’s main responsibility was to keep the action clear while providing evidence of military scope and efficiency, but his compositions demonstrate the understated snap that classical moviemakers achieved simply by put
ting
the camera in the right place. The formations of the men are as memorable when they’re huddled en masse on the ground, waiting for the next move, as they are when they’re marching. In images from an epoch before people reflexively adapted their conduct for movie cameras, there’s an endearing poise in the shots of Red Cross women pouring drinks for the servicemen and handing them rations. The embarkation center footage contains purely documentary shots of officers scanning paperwork, but there are also frames that rival those in Vidor’s
The Crowd:
rows of female secretaries stooped over their desks and a wall-length filing cabinet stretching from the floor to some high windows. Fleming conveys the tension and drudgery in tasks like loading the Belgian relief ship
Remier
with supplies, and the controlled tumult of troop ferries docking at Hoboken.

The high point of his Hoboken footage, though, comes when the liner
Leviathan
participates in an abandon-ship drill. During this full-dress rehearsal for catastrophe, Fleming’s ability to keep lines of action in deep focus in one setup after another brings out the drama beneath the matter-of-factness. After the lifeboats are lowered, life rafts slowly slither down the sides of the ships, like rubbery mollusks. In the transfer of men from rafts to boats, one or two fall overboard and splash around in life preservers, and with the exercise nearly complete, the rafts bob around empty, filled with water. In
Action,
Fleming recalled “one occasion when a thousand men were struggling in the water and all life boats were overside.” It looks more like a few hundred men, and very few of them are struggling. Whatever the count, this cameraman achieves indelible documentary impact.

On August 25, Ellis once again demonstrated his trust in Fleming. He wrote from the War Department’s Office of the Chief of Staff in Washington, asking “Dear Fleming” to make an official report about a lieutenant who had been “insubordinate” at Fort Sill. Perhaps to his chagrin (he did hate the heat), Fleming was sent back to Washington himself in Indian summer and stayed on through most of the fall, working for the Army War College’s propaganda division from September to November. Although no specifics are known, he processed film from France and edited it into civilian propaganda films for the Committee on Public Information. On September 30, he was promoted to first lieutenant and given “one of the precious blanket passes. Which meant that I might go anywhere at any time, without question. It was a rare honor, but it was also the instrument which kept me in service long after the war ended.”

What
he called “a confidential mission” took Fleming to New York, where he was when the armistice was declared on November 11. He hankered to get back to Fairbanks and filmmaking and civilian fun and, on November 16, wrote a letter to his immediate superior, Captain Charles F. Betz, stating that he’d been left in limbo. Betz, a career officer, counseled patience with a letter addressed to Fleming at the Friars Club:

Suggest you “hold fast” for the time being. Nothing definite can be stated now, but it is believed that within the next two weeks instructions will be issued from the War Department in which case we will know exactly how to act. There have been quite a few who have jumped to the conclusion on the spur of the moment of getting out, and which caused rather harsh comment. You have done such excellent work that a few weeks delay would not cause any great hindrance to you. Suggest that you “go slow” for the time being. If anything comes up will keep you posted.