Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (22 page)

Bow knew
Wings
would be another breakthrough: her first part in a bona fide super-production. Apart from trying to be a right gal for a publicist friend, is it so hard to comprehend why she’d make her announcement during that heady time? After all, when she spoke about Fleming, she described him as the man who gave good counsel when she had what future generations would call “an identity crisis” over becoming a star. “You couldn’t deceive him with any false glitter,” she said. “He steered me straight a lot of times when I was going ‘haywire.’ ” She said when they got engaged in 1926, “I began to read again, and to enjoy music, and to grow calmer about many things.”

It’s testimony to Fleming’s fortitude that he had a calming effect on Bow during what she called their engagement, because at that time he was experiencing the kind of pressure that would make lesser directors crumple. On September 21, Paramount’s West Coast production manager, Sam Jaffe, came to San Antonio to take the pulse of the studio’s runaway productions. Both
The Rough Riders
and
Wings
suffered from
the
weather. If Fleming wanted absolute sun, Wellman wanted sunlight with a few clouds to contrast with the speeding planes; gray skies did neither of them any good. After Jaffe left, Fleming doubled his efforts to pick up the pace wherever he could. (Bow returned to California on September 25.) Astor wrote that they “worked like slaves to make up the lost time,” doing “twenty scenes in one day.” One bout of running down a road in the Texas heat, wearing corsets and heavy Gay Nineties clothing, made her collapse and knock off for three days.

The urgency to bring off the special-effects-laden action scenes grew particularly intense. Hathaway was preparing shots of an American observation balloon when the same Frank Madigan who helped Howe create the crab dolly arrived with Fourth of July pyrotechnics—small devices that could whirl around in the air before detonating like bullets, setting off smoke clouds and giving audiences the impression that they were “exploding in the balloon.” Hathaway instructed his crew: “Set your things so there’s no way of hitting the balloon,” which was carrying a stuntman. He caught a break when the first explosive device grazed the balloon, rebounded, and went off. “The next one goes, hits the balloon, blows it up. Thank God there was only one man [‘the second man chickened out’] because he climbed out and slid down the cable. Boy, was he raw—his hands, his legs that he wound around the cable.”

As usual, Fleming’s practical-joke side escalated with risky circumstances. He asked Howe, “Jimmy, you want to take a ride in [the balloon]?” Howe said, “Sure,” so Fleming said, “Take your camera up there and get a shot.” Howe recalled, “He put the camera in this basket and he let this thing up there, and we got some shots . . . Then I said, ‘Victor, take us down.’ I must have been up about 150 feet or so . . . and Fleming I would see down there swinging this rope. You know what he was trying to do? He was trying to get it loose up there . . . He’s crazy. Vicious.”

Fleming’s production returned to California on October 21 and moved to Santa Cruz for twenty-one days of shooting, re-creating the Cuban invasion and several major battles. The push to get the movie done was staggering and so was the size of the production: in addition to the 150-strong company, the 1,200 extras included 250 African-Americans as members of the all-black Tenth Cavalry. Hathaway organized a string of explosives to go off while the Yanks were making a river crossing. Before shooting he ordered his special-effects guy to
put
one charge down at the last minute, right before Charles Emmett Mack hit a particular spot, for prime dramatic effect. But when Fleming called “Action!” and Mack made his mark and Hathaway was supposed to punch a nail on a strike board to set off the explosion, he couldn’t remember “which damn nail” to strike. Fleming stopped the camera to dry off and regroup everyone who was wet. But Hathaway’s freeze delay saved a life—not Mack’s, but the special-effects technician’s. He hadn’t been able to lay the charge in time. “He was so scared and he thought he was going to get the hell blown out of him.” Hathaway was thinking, “If I’d have hit that nail, he’d have been pieces.”

Fleming used miniatures for the sinking of the
Maine
(Paramount production records show Wilmington, California, as the location for shots of the searchlights and the gun deck) and reassembled the cast and crew for unspecified reshoots between December 28 and January 8, 1927. The
Variety
critic alluded to “considerable trouble with the film before it was ready to be shown,” and the negative buzz might have tainted the trade paper’s review. Most critics applauded, including Mordaunt Hall of
The New York Times,
who reported the audience’s delight at the comic interplay of Noah Beery, as Sheriff Hell’s Bells of Roaring Forks, New Mexico, and George Bancroft, as Happy Joe, who breaks jail to join his troop. There was a subplot of cowardice; Bert bolts from the battle lines but achieves salvation when he ignites the charge up San Juan Hill. Still, the movie pivots more on buddy-film reversals: Hell’s Bells and Happy Joe, Farrell’s Van and Mack’s Bert, take turns bonding under pressure. Hall singled out Farrell’s ability “to express his emotions with a sense of humor” as well as his and Mack’s “sincerity” in the scene of Van singing military songs as he hauls the mortally wounded Bert to the hospital tent. “You can’t call a man a coward—if he dies trying!” reads the title card. Mack died in a car accident on March 17, two days after the film’s New York premiere. Fleming served as one of the pallbearers.

It’s doubtful that Bow met Gary Cooper when he did his small, attention-getting part as a fatalistic flier in
Wings
(they
may
have collided on the two-day train ride from L.A. to San Antonio). But Bow did co-star with Cooper, and fall for him, on their next film, Frank Lloyd’s
Children of Divorce
(1927)—catalyzing a temporary break with Fleming. (“It’s all right to be directed by a man you don’t know very well, but having the man you are engaged to direct you just doesn’t work out,” Bow said. “When a man likes you real well, you know, you can get away
with
anything.”) After Frank Strayer’s negligible
Rough House Rosie, Hula
came around a few months later, with Fleming attached to it. By then he was ready to forgive her and direct her; Bow and Cooper were no longer an item. (Cooper thought that what broke them up was Bow’s inability to shake her feelings for Fleming.)

Ever the pro, Fleming would turn Cooper into the It Boy by setting him up to be a sexual icon in 1929’s
Wolf Song
(co-starring Lupe Velez, also a lover to Fleming and Cooper at different times). And he’d perfect Cooper’s screen image when he directed him in
The Virginian
later that same year. But for now, he had another kind of superstar on his hands: Emil Jannings.

10

From
The Way of All Flesh
to
Abie’s Irish Rose

When Paramount seduced the German star Emil Jannings in 1926 with $400,000 a year—and the rare guarantee that his films would be shot in sequential order, “according to plot instead of according to the set-builders’ convenience”—B. P. Schulberg (Budd’s father) assigned Fleming to Jannings’s first American production,
The Way of All Flesh
(1927). Schulberg reckoned that one outsized personality demanded another. Jannings was an international acting potentate with transcontinental charisma. He saw himself as a cinematic demigod: maybe that’s why he maintained that he was born in Brooklyn to Americans of German descent, when actually he was born in the aptly named Rorschach, Switzerland, to an American-born father and German mother. A carnival strongman who rose to become “Kaiser of Berlin’s theatrical world” and then, after Ernst Lubitsch cast him as Louis XV in
Passion
(1919), Kaiser of Berlin’s film world, too, he relished his position and enacted it with noblesse oblige. He made a point, when he first reached Hollywood, of shaking hands with everyone on Paramount’s staff. (He had no love for America: he stayed for less than three years and, after returning to Germany in 1929, destroyed his reputation with support for the Nazis.)

The
New Yorker
’s Elsie McCormick summed up Jannings as “a large, beaming, childlike personage who looks out upon the world with the expression of a good-natured cherub. This cheerful ingenuousness somehow makes those around him feel that he should be pampered like a youngster and protected from adult annoyances. Even his impressive size does not prevent the women with whom he is associated from developing a maternal attitude.”

He was not going to get any mothering from Fleming, who babied only his girlfriends. And during
The Way of All Flesh,
even that well of
warmth
was running low. Bow started filming
Children of Divorce
with Cooper on November 26; within a week reporters took her comments that she and Fleming “have had a slight disagreement and the wedding is postponed.” She told Adela Rogers St. Johns a year later that she “needed romance” and her and Fleming’s “feeling for each other became more and more that of close friendship and less and less that of lovers.” Several years later she added, “I couldn’t live up to his subtlety.” Cooper’s attraction was more direct: Bow famously bragged to Hedda Hopper, “He’s hung like a horse and can go all night!”

Fleming never made a public statement about any of his affairs; by then he knew how changeable Bow could be (they would get back together before the break of summer). On the rebound, he went out with a Bow manqué, a bobbed redhead named Alice White, who in 1930 was named by Cecil Beaton as one of the most beautiful women in the movies, along with Lillian Gish, Dolores Del Rio, Norma Shearer, and Greta Garbo. Her background was almost as juicy as Bow’s. Born Alva White (possibly out of wedlock) in Paterson, New Jersey, raised by her Italian immigrant grandparents, she ended up with them in Los Angeles, and found her way into movies as a script girl for von Sternberg and for Chaplin. Dubbed “Peter Rabbit” for being “so stubby and fat and pink-looking,” she caught fire in front of a cameraman who was snapping some test shots for a new lens, and Chaplin made her a stand-in. She then performed her own extreme makeover, shedding forty pounds, losing her spectacles, and straightening her hair. Beginning as an extra (notably in 1924’s
Thief of Bagdad
), she was still an extra when Fleming first dated her, but she was angling to be an actress. She also was determined to be as frank as Bow about her escapades. Her first kiss with Fleming, she wrote in a published diary, was “a nice little-boy kiss. No thrills.” But “a girl can’t help liking Victor. He’s so awfully nice and sort of babies her.”

Fleming reveled in his burgeoning status. In March 1926, when Kathleen Clifford married the banker Mirimir Illitch, he sold the Gardner Street house and moved to his bachelor house on Cove Way in Beverly Hills, not far from his friends Arthur and Lu Rosson, around the corner from Buster Keaton, and down the road from both Chaplin and Fairbanks. The ad he composed bursts with pride:

HERE’S
A BARGAIN

AM MOVING TO BEVERLY HILLS

Will sell my beautiful English stucco bungalow at extremely low price. Six lovely rooms and a separate small bungalow for maid. 1632 Gardner, just south of Hollywood Blvd. See it today. Owner, GR 7220

Early in 1927, Fleming also bought a spread north of Encinitas to provide an escape from Hollywood and to host friends like Fairbanks and lovers like Bow and White. He paid $250,000 for the eleven-hundred-acre Meadowlark Ranch (he purchased even more land later) and announced plans (unfulfilled) to expand the residence into a Spanish-style hacienda. It remained “a very modest house,” his niece Yvonne Blocksom said, with two bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, and a screened-in porch. “No pretense. Uncle Vic was not one for pretension.” He did clear a landing strip, plant grain to feed the livestock, and fill the land with horses, cattle, and Poland China pigs—a special show breed. “Part of the ranch was on the other side of the road. An old stone house, a waterfall. And the horses were all loose-running, so if we wanted to ride, we had to go out there and lasso them.” Edward Hartman, at age seven, was tucked into bed there one night when a voice startled him: “Move over, kid, I’m getting in.” It was Douglas Fairbanks. (And a far more innocent time, echoing the days of bed sharing in frontier inns.)

Fleming enjoyed playing the paterfamilias; it was good research for his new movie. Although
The Way of All Flesh
borrowed the title of Samuel Butler’s severe novel about patriarchal tyranny, it was a tearjerker for daddies. The script originally carried the title
The Man Who Forgot God,
from an unrealized project by Bruce Barton, the advertising-meets-religion guru of the Roaring Twenties, who interpreted Jesus as the ultimate promoter, entrepreneur, and organization man. Barton had written an update of the David and Bathsheba story—a fable that would find its way into parts of Fleming’s
Red Dust.
But Jules Furthman’s screenplay for
The Way of All Flesh
is about a chief cashier ( Jannings) with a half-dozen kids and a doting wife (played by none other than Belle Bennett, the self-sacrificing mother in 1925’s tearjerker for mommies,
Stella Dallas
). He falls from grace and contentment when the bank director asks him to transport bonds to a distant city. In the original script he went from
Weimar
to Berlin, but the shooting script Americanized the action to Milwaukee and Chicago. On the train, he meets a bottle-blond floozy (Phyllis Haver), who gets him to commit drunken adultery in the Windy City; then she swipes the bonds and splits. In a glitch of fate that preserves the antihero’s honor, a railroad runs over a thug who has picked Jannings’s pockets and scavenged his identification papers. But Jannings cannot tell the truth, recover his identity,
and
keep his good name. He becomes one of the anonymous urban poor and, in a climactic twist, chooses to preserve his reputation (and his family’s) and accept a prison term for his own murder.