Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (16 page)

The surviving print of this movie is a shambles, combining bits and pieces of the setup with most of the last two reels; when I viewed it at the Library of Congress, it was sandwiched around an entirely different movie, Lois Weber’s
Midnight Romance
(previously thought lost). The script
does
survive; to judge from it and the available footage, Fleming’s movie is an amiable, slaphappy curiosity, with another of the director’s clever animated interludes (this time a lampoon of urban crowding) and one bizarre twist. At the climax, an all-black U.S. Marine unit saves the day, whipping wicked white authority figures and their mobs into order.

Is the imagery racist or antiracist? Are audiences meant to savor the supposed irony of blacks laying down the law to unruly whites? The sequence leaves contemporary viewers amused and perplexed, especially since the most prominent black character, the insurance salesman and heir’s right-hand man, is played by a broad blackface comic, Tom Wilson. The movie does provide happy echoes of knockabout Fairbanks vehicles like
Reaching for the Moon
and
His Majesty the American,
but it may have taught Fleming a lesson in the uses of star power: Basil Sydney, as the hero, is no Fairbanks. There’s no sparkle to his smile. And there’s not enough spring to his step. When Fleming uses a Fairbanks trick from
The Half-Breed
in
Red Hot Romance,
filming Sydney dropping off a wall, then printing it as if he’s scaling it, Sydney doesn’t move with enough authority to make the charade convincing.

In the midst of completing
Red Hot Romance,
Fleming began a seven-year stint with Paramount/Famous Players–Lasky. His studio debut,
The Lane That Had No Turning
(1922), was released almost simultaneously with his final Emerson-Loos comedy. For Paramount, though, he’d made a melodramatic farrago set in French Canada and based on a Sir Gilbert Parker novel. It centered on a budding opera star (Agnes Ayres), but was filled with soap-operatic twists involving her increasingly unhinged hunchback husband (Theodore Kosloff ) and a
hidden
will. The film won praise in
The New York Times
for “two scenes where double exposure is used with dramatic effect.”

During this honeymoon period at Paramount, Fleming helped Howard Hawks land his first sizable studio job as one of four production editors in the scenario department. Hawks gave sole credit for his hire to an even bigger name, Irving Thalberg, the not-yet-thirty “boy genius” of Universal then en route to mythic stature with Louis B. Mayer at MGM. Hawks would say that Paramount’s Jesse L. Lasky declared, “Thalberg says you know more about stories than anybody else he knows, so I’d like to have you.”

But who would have been the more likely Hawks supporter—Thalberg or Fleming, his best pal? In his reminiscences, Hawks became addicted to retrospective one-upmanship; he downplayed Fleming’s talents and contributions. Still, they
were
best friends. Probably speaking about the time in Fleming’s life after he split from Clifford, Hawks said that Vic once dropped by his house for a visit and ended up staying for five years. That turns out to be another Hawksian exaggeration, but Howard and his brother Kenneth lived in a couple of houses in the early 1920s that became havens for high-powered bachelors like Fleming and the actor turned director Jack Conway. John Gilbert also participated in the single-guy high jinks. Eddie Sutherland, a vaudeville-comedy veteran who later directed giddy hits like
International House
(1933), became part of the Hawks group, too, calling it “a dandy little household.” Sutherland may have embellished the facts when he said one house had a rain machine, “so if you were sitting there with your fiancée or something and you didn’t want [her] to go home, you’d turn on the rain, and when you decided she should go, you turned it off.” But Sutherland was being real when he remembered Fleming at that time as “a tough guy, a great big strong fellow,” who also had a keen sense of what would work for him on-screen. Fleming bailed out on
Behind the Front,
a service comedy presenting “the first nonsense side” of World War I, and recommended that Sutherland take it over.

Gilbert and Conway probably brought Thalberg into the fold. They and a writer named Jack Colton had already formed a Thalberg friendship group nicknamed “the Three Jacks.” Thalberg’s longtime story editor Samuel Marx described Colton as “a world-weary homosexual who could be persuaded over drinks to discuss revealing intimacies of love between males,” while Conway and Gilbert “relentlessly stalked the beauties of Hollywood, of which there was a plentiful sup
ply.”
The Three Jacks introduced the seemingly ethereal Thalberg to “the pleasures to be derived from sex.” Later, Hawks and company pitched in, too. Thalberg’s two great loves were both linked, in varying degrees, to Fleming: Constance Talmadge and Norma Shearer, who fell for Vic on the set of
Empty Hands
(1924).

The screenwriter John Lee Mahin, who got to know Fleming a few years later, thought the Hawks brothers gave him swank and refinement. “Howard had class, you see. Vic had innate class, but he wasn’t born to the purple like Howard was. He didn’t have the advantage of his young life, the rearing.” Yet Fleming’s years with Fairbanks, Emerson, and Loos had already spruced him up smartly. He may have found it socially and sexually useful to foster the illusion that he had a roughneck background and rose from abject poverty. Bessie Love knew him professionally from her days as a Fairbanks co-star and romantically by the time she appeared in
A Son of His Father
(1925). When Kevin Brownlow interviewed her in 1971, she said, “I loved Vic,” and recalled, “I once asked him where he came from, where he went to school. There was a long pause. ‘Oxnard,’ he said. I took no notice. It was only later I discovered that he had come from a very poor background.” Love remembered that he used to pronounce “-ing” as if it were “-een”—as in “eateen and drinkeen” and “singeen.” (She said Marshall Neilan did that, too.) Fleming once told Howard Hawks’s formidable and socially prominent mother that she taught him how to use a knife and fork; Love thought Mrs. Hawks took that statement literally.

In 1929, Love married another Hawks brother, William, who for many years acted as Fleming’s agent. Other women went back and forth between Fleming and the Hawkses throughout the 1920s. Howard was briefly engaged to Pauline Starke, who had starred in Fleming’s
Devil’s Cargo
and
Adventure,
both supervised by Hawks. In 1926, Howard met his first wife, Athole Shearer, because Fleming had been wooing her sister, Norma; and in 1928, Kenneth Hawks married Mary Astor, the female lead of Fleming’s
Rough Riders.

Ferocious yet friendly competition, with a patina of class, formed the basis of all this Hawks-Fleming bonding. Hawks’s tale of them meeting during an auto race hit on its essence. The unapologetic masculine ardor flaring out of their best buddy pictures (say,
Ceiling Zero
for Hawks and
Test Pilot
for Fleming) reflects their offscreen connection. Hawks once recounted to Joseph McBride that he and Fleming “just started” calling each other Dan: “He’d say, ‘Dan, what are you
gonna
do?’ And I’d say, ‘Dan, I don’t know.’ And we’d go out and get into some kind of trouble.” (Fleming’s daughters tell similar stories about Hawks and their father calling each other Ed.) These two talented fellows swam through the same hormonal Hollywood atmosphere. They extended the chemistry of adolescent chums well into adulthood. Even given occasional jealousy on Hawks’s part, their friendship was one of the purest things about them. After Fleming’s death, Hawks’s propensity to contend he had the upper hand as a person and a pro may give a sour cast to almost all the anecdotes Hawks would tell about his best friend. But scrape away Hawks’s self-promotion and you can still feel the shared zing of two world-beaters rivaling each other zestfully at every macho pastime.

“I think I got about an hour and three-quarters flying, and they made me an instructor,” Hawks said of teaching flying down in Texas during World War I. “There were two or three thousand cadets down there,” he said, “and about seven or eight planes. They didn’t even have enough planes to train people.” He must have been a decent teacher, because the Army Air Corps kept him at it. And in 1921 he probably encouraged Fleming to become an aviator, joining other movie-land pilots such as Cecil B. DeMille and Wallace Beery. Fleming took instruction at Rogers Field in Los Angeles and Clover Field in Santa Monica. One of his instructors was Gilbert Budwig, an early test pilot.

Hawks told Peter Bogdanovich that he and Fleming “built a couple of airplanes. One of them was very fast, but it was also very heavy. We used to call it the ‘Cast-Iron Wonder.’ We knew if we could get up, we could go faster than anything around, but it broke its landing gear every time it landed!” Inevitably, Hawks characterized Fleming as a pilot easily spooked compared with himself, a paragon of coolness:

We built an airplane for racing, he flew it in the first race, won the race, and landed it and the landing gear broke. And I said, “Next time you better let me fly it.” And I flew it and won the race and the landing gear broke when we landed. We flew it in four races and won four races and every time broke the landing gear. Then we gave up on that airplane. He was funny. He came in one day and wanted a drink. “Well,” he said, “I’m through flying.” I said, “Why?” “Well,” he said, “you know that new airplane? I landed it—perfectly good landing—right out in the middle of a landing strip,” he said. “I pulled the lever
and
let the wheels down. What I meant to do was put the flaps up.” “Oh,” I said, “Vic, anybody does that.” He said, “That isn’t what I’m talking about. I’m so sore about doing that to a new airplane, I went in and had a cup of coffee and they passed me the sugar and I unwrapped the sugar, threw the sugar away, put the paper in my coffee cup.” He said, “I have no business flying any more.” But he did.

Indeed, Fleming kept improving his standing in the flying world. After soloing for more than three hundred hours in a secondhand Curtiss JN-4, or “Jenny”—a popular instruction vehicle favored by barnstorming pilots—Fleming mastered another slow-moving war-surplus trainer, the Standard J-1, then a Catron & Fisk CF-15, often used for racing and aerobatics.

Flying must have given Fleming more satisfaction than his first few Paramount movies. (Most of his Paramount films have been lost.) After
The Lane That Had No Turning,
he shifted gears with
Anna Ascends
(also 1922). It was the film version of Harry Chapman Ford’s stage melodrama about an immigrant waitress in New York City’s Little Syria district who triumphs over dire obstacles, including a brush with murder, to become a productive, happy American. (In the play she nearly kills a rapist; in the film, a diamond smuggler.) Although
The New York Times
summarized
Anna Ascends
as “a collection of puppets in a mechanical plot,” the movie is notable for two reasons. It features an Arab-American as the protagonist (although she was played on Broadway and in Fleming’s film by the Irish-American Alice Brady), and it marked the debut of sixteen-year-old Betty Bronson, who credited Fleming with helping her land her most famous part: the title role in Herbert Brenon’s
Peter Pan.

Dark Secrets
(1923) starred Dorothy Dalton as an “untamable” society gal, crippled in a riding accident and courted by an Egyptian mystic who offers to cure her in exchange for marriage. (A virtuous Egyptian servant kills the quack and restores the heroine to her true love.) In stills, Dalton has the bold, dark beauty of Anjelica Huston;
Photoplay
noted that because she was nearing the end of a long-term contract, she was making $5,000 a week, “far more than such favorites as Pola Negri or Gloria Swanson.” But the movie’s main interest was its reliance on the notions of the chic French hypnotherapist Emile Coué (author of
Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion
). His signature line, “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better,” became
one
of the jumping-off points for the satire of Nathanael West in his 1934 novella
A Cool Million.
Along with
The Lane That Had No Turning
’s Theodore Kosloff, Dalton also starred in Fleming’s next lost picture,
The Law of the Lawless
(also 1923). This tale of Tartar and Gypsy rivalries on the shores of the Black Sea derived from a story by Konrad Bercovici.
Photoplay
said, “It never seems real anywhere,” but Fleming won approval from
Variety:
“In direction the picture is well handled.”

Amid all this heavy industry and fine carousing, Fleming managed to romance Virginia Valli, an actress at Universal. “You could always tell who his current girlfriend was by whoever’s picture was on the piano,” said his niece Yvonne Blocksom, who recalled seeing Valli’s photo there. Fleming never guided Valli through a film.

He did direct the frequent Western heroine Lois Wilson in back-to-back Zane Grey adaptations,
To the Last Man
and
The Call of the Canyon
(both 1923). Wilson’s niece Sheila Shay (the daughter of the director George Fitzmaurice) says of Wilson and Fleming, “I’m sure she liked him as a director and probably as a person,” and, “They seemed to enjoy one another’s company.” Fleming shot both films in Arizona
—To the Last Man
in Tonto Basin (where he had shot
The Mollycoddle
), and
The Call of the Canyon
in Sedona—and he and Wilson, an expert rider, would go searching together on horseback for picturesque locations. One day, Fleming insisted on roaming into a dead volcano to see, he said, “a pine tree growing right in the middle.” Wilson said, “We rode our horses down into that dead crater, and we had a very hard time getting back. I got a little panicky, but we made it. Victor said he found out that the last thing in the world to do is ride down into a dead crater, because it’s all ash.”