Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (23 page)

The Way of All Flesh
was an ideal conveyance for Jannings’s adroit masochism. (Unfortunately, even this famous film has been lost.) At the time of its premiere, Jannings praised “Mr. Fleming and Mr. Schulberg” for filming it in sequence and for completing shooting “in six weeks—in Germany they would have taken six months.” A master of makeup, Jannings also appreciated the care Fleming and his assistant—Hathaway again—took in preparing the look, up to a custom hairpiece that extended his hairline when the character was young. Its removal, of course, then made him look old. (George Westmore, Hollywood’s pioneer of creative makeup, and/or one of his sons, conceived the look.)

In his posthumously published (1951) memoir, Jannings wrote that he and Fleming

discussed every scene as a matter of principle. He usually asked: “How do you want to do this, Emil?” I told him what I thought, he listened attentively and responded: “If that’s what you feel—good! Do it!” But then he watched like a hellhound. His often repeated, whispered “Too much!” liberated me more and more, all in a sense of friendship, and I realized to my astonishment that a very different Jannings came out of the shell—a simpler, less burdened, more matter-of-fact person. I believe that it was Fleming’s great fortune that he had never been an actor. With his natural artistry he personified what every actor wishes for—the ideal audience!

It took time to reach that accord. Fleming was accustomed to megaphoning his directions to actors who followed them immediately. The German star, said Fleming for public consumption, insisted on
dissecting
every change and discussing “the situation so thoroughly that Jannings became in fact the character of the story, feeling the same emotions, venting the perfect reactions. It did not take me long to realize that Jannings can never give a true Jannings performance when he feels that he is acting. And that is why I say that an actor who acts is never a good actor.”

Jannings requested that Fleming go on to direct
The Last Command.
(That didn’t happen because of scheduling conflicts with
Abie’s Irish Rose.
) Still, Hathaway, who thought Jannings was a problem drinker, witnessed titanic clashes between them. The day they shot the cashier antihero waking up with a hangover, Jannings took “about three or four slugs of whiskey,” said Hathaway; then Jannings fell asleep. Fleming “went over and turned out that light and quietly left . . . Jannings woke up on a dark stage about two hours later.” Hathaway claimed Jannings threw a fit, summoned Schulberg to his dressing room, and called Vic a “son of a bitch.” Fleming responded, “I don’t want to work with any autocratic German son of a bitch who’s drunk. You can take me off the picture, I don’t care.”

Jannings’s next director, Josef von Sternberg, who became the director of
The Last Command
and then was invited to Germany for
The Blue Angel,
told a slightly different version, with an acid moral. According to von Sternberg, Jannings loved practical jokes, except when they were played on him—any reference to those “would bathe him in gloom.” Fleming simply asked him to perform his sleeping scene with “more conviction,” and Jannings, “needing no such spur,” fell into such profound slumber that Fleming, unable to rouse him, moved his crew to another set and continued filming. “Jannings awoke eight hours later no longer the object of intense interest, alone and abandoned on a pitch-black stage. Except on that occasion, he was never alone, behaving as if the Earth were worthless unless it revolved around him.”

After the Sturm und Drang, the movie was a critical and popular success and, along with
The Last Command,
won Emil Jannings the first Academy Award for best actor (in a ceremony that didn’t take place until 1929). Fleming’s use of a moving camera as a mood reader and probe won comparisons to F. W. Murnau’s and E. A. Dupont’s collaborations with Jannings on, respectively,
The Last Laugh
(1924) and
Variety
(1925). Even a Paramount publicity item singled out the way the camera follows Jannings “around one room, down a long hallway and into a second room, recording every action on the way.” Berlin critics
contemptuous
of the movie’s pathos-laden finale still praised Jannings and Fleming—one even called it the star’s “greatest success.”

There was a strong dissenter: Luis Buñuel. He had no use for Jannings: “For him, suffering is a prism cut into a hundred facets. That’s why he’s capable of acting in a close-up from 150 feet, and if one were to ask even more of him, he’d manage to show us how an entire film could be made of nothing but his face.” Buñuel treated Fleming as a skilled opponent: there’s a poetic rightness to the premier avant-garde director of his time attacking the man who would go on to make two of the most popular movies of all time. “Devoid of authentic emotion, Victor Fleming’s film is, ultimately, a counterfeit. Although technically excellent, this film shares with many others the distinction of appealing more to our tear glands than to our sensibilities. One could hear the tears falling on the theater floor. Everyone was exposed deep down as a crybaby at the showing of
The Way of All Flesh.
” Edmund Wilson disdainfully referred to the movie’s “ballast of American hokum.” But Yvonne Blocksom, who saw it at age twelve, fondly recalled not only the film but also its sniffling audience.

Few Hollywood directors worried about their international reputations. What was significant, even at relatively lighthearted Paramount, was their standing within their own company and industry. Fleming was now near the top. Frank Tuttle and Clarence Badger (
It
) held tidier paychecks, but neither had bettered Fleming’s critical and box-office record.

Out of the studio, Fleming was sustaining
some
kind of relationship with Alice White—and with Bow, too, who, after a few months, was cooling on Cooper. “Gary was big and strong, but Victor was older and understood me,” Bow said. “You know I have always been terribly lonesome. I have no brothers, no sisters, no mother. I need someone to soothe and quiet me. Victor was like that. I mothered Gary, but Victor mothered me.”

In case Victor needed some mothering, there was the soft shoulder of Hedda Hopper, not yet a fearsome gossip columnist but a forty-two-year-old actress and divorcée when Fleming squired her to Hollywood events like the premiere of
Seventh Heaven.
When Hopper did become a columnist, in 1938, she championed Fleming in ultra-personal terms, raving about “that great shaggy head of his, with his fine, sensitive features and hands like a surgeon,” or “blue eyes, iron grey hair, and bronzed face . . . almost as dashing as Rhett Butler.”

Motion
Picture
magazine completed its 1928–29 series on the “love-lives” of Hollywood women by proclaiming Fleming one of the two “Beau Brummells of Hollywood” (the other was the leading man Ben Lyon) and noting, “Many of the men have commented on their honorable mentions [in the series]. But not Victor Fleming. A real sheik doesn’t talk, we take it, unless he is love-making.”

How did he keep his balance if he wasn’t sounding off? His older daughter, Victoria, said, decades later, “Daddy used to bring his girlfriends around to Mother for her approval.” When Victoria said “Mother,” she meant
her
mother, Lu, then the wife of the director Arthur Rosson. But years before Vic and Lu changed their relationship from friend and confidante to husband and wife, there was another love bout—and another movie—with Bow.

Hula
(1927) is the sort of cheerfully flimsy picture that critics and serious fans disparage, with some cause, for being unworthy of its stars and creators. Reteaming Fleming and Bow, Paramount wanted to recapture the magic of
Mantrap.
In little more than a year, the director and the star, as well as being an on-and-off item in the fan magazines, had acquired enough luster to put a shine on any property—including one about the farmer’s daughter. In this case it’s a Hawaiian plantation owner’s daughter named Hula (Bow) emerging into ripeness when a handsome British engineer, Haldane (Clive Brook), arrives on the scene.

In his unpublished notes on Fleming, Kevin Brownlow rightly puts this movie in the category of silent-star vehicles of the mid-1920s that are comparable to star-oriented network-TV series. But seen fresh, the movie has a flighty charm. Fleming didn’t stint on craftsmanship. “We worked down on the Lucky Baldwin place,” Hathaway remembered, “now the Los Angeles County Arboretum in Arcadia. Beautiful location. That big old wooden house there and the lake around it, palm trees. We used the Queen Anne cottage [it also appeared in the TV series
Fantasy Island
] for one of those plantation-type wooden houses.”

Fleming taught Hathaway that “it’s better to have one tree in a cross or back light than a forest in flat light.”
Hula
is lush and lively, like
Mantrap,
but with less satiric edge and more florid romance. A
tropical
wilderness movie,
Hula
embraces the Bow image minted in
Mantrap
and cemented in
It
and takes a giant step into the primal. The heroine doesn’t grow out of the urban erotic renewal of jazz babies and flappers, though she would appeal to them. Her untamable sexiness repre
sents
how any normal red-blooded girl would feel in Hawaii, a state of nature if not yet a state. Hula’s dad (Albert Gran) hangs out with boringly dissolute Westerners. One of the harshest laughs of the movie comes when Fleming pans around this gluttonous, inebriated crowd the way he did around the teetotalers in
Mantrap.

Hula’s guiding light proves to be a half-Hawaiian, half-Caucasian cowboy (Agostino Borgato). In its own not-so-naïve way, the movie ridicules the negative concept of “going native.” By the end, the uptight Brit gets the message that native is better. Forget the machinations of the rotter who lusts for Hula, the female rotter who lusts for Haldane, and the ultimate villainess, Haldane’s wife (Patty DuPont). What’s memorable about the film are precisely the scenes that made it disreputable: Hula’s opening skinny-dip, where she flicks at a flower with her toes only to have a bee sting her on her thigh (yes, silent-film lip-readers, the legend is true: you can distinctly see her mouth form the words “Oh, fuck!”); her rump-first meet-cute with Haldane in his room, where she’s gone to fetch her scruffy dog from under Haldane’s bed; her grass-skirt hula (more of a soft-shoe dance than authentic Hawaiian hip wriggling), which she does at a wingding of a luau, instinctively knowing it will drive her loathsome admirer wild and jolt her proper-gentleman hero into action. They all build to the moment when she visits Haldane in the shack he’s set up next to his dam site and puts her toothbrush next to his. Never has the urge to “shack up” been so economically expressed.

Fleming’s affection for his star—and her sensitivity to it—keep the film light and limber. It’s a cinematic love letter written in the eyes and torso of the respondent. The whole thing would collapse if there were anything coy about it, but Fleming doesn’t exploit his lover; he leads her toward an irresistible performance. Her boldness is unconstrained. She rides her horse into her dining room; she admits she set off dynamite to bag her man. Her movements have a speedy grace, whether she’s showing off her bee-stung thigh or fingering the cleft in Haldane’s chin. Brook later said, “For all the acting I did, they might as well have poured me out of a bottle.” But Brook is a perfect foil for Bow—if this bit of British sterling melts before her,
no one
has a chance when she puts her mind to it. According to Budd Schulberg, B. P. Schulberg had a fallback plan to ballyhoo White as a “blonde Clara Bow” if
Hula
flopped. But
Hula
was boffo. And White ended up being remembered, in Lew Ayres’s phrase, as “a poor man’s Clara Bow.”

William
Kaplan, a Paramount propman, said Bow was just a conquest for Fleming on
Mantrap,
but by the time they made
Hula,
“Vic was fascinated with her. It was a
very
serious thing.” (Kaplan thought Fleming was juggling White and Bow during
Mantrap.
) Was Vic looking for Lu Rosson’s approval when he dined with the Rossons on June 12, possibly with Bow? In mid-July he helped Bow seal her new Paramount contract: he had her take out the morals clause, as he later did with his own contract at MGM. And on July 24 he took her to a college-themed night at the Montmartre Café, where they joined the “special dance contest” late in the evening and were “noted as graceful dancers on the floor.” Shortly afterward, without Bow, he accompanied the director Herbert Brenon on a trip to London, where Brenon was doing exteriors for
Sorrell and Son.
Fleming had no role in the shoot—the cameraman was James Wong Howe—so he might have gone for personal reasons, to test Bow’s maturity and loyalty. In his development notes on
Bombshell
five years later, Fleming said of the director-hero’s relationship with a Bow-like star named Lola, “He went out of town on location for two weeks, and that ended things between Lola and him. She couldn’t stay true to him twenty-four hours.”

Upon his return, Fleming and Bow were sighted at the local premiere of the Edward Everett Horton stage vehicle
Going Crooked,
on August 29. But that was it. Fleming wasn’t “social” or maybe “showy” enough for Bow, according to her friend and future stepmother, Tui Lorraine. And Bow was too much of a sexual gadabout for Fleming. A few years later, Bow mused that he was “too much older” and “gosh, he was too subtle.”

In those
Bombshell
notes, Fleming describes his alter ego, Brogan, as “a big, handsome he-man, who has made most of Lola’s successful pictures. He falls for every new girl he works with. His ego is equal to that of a star.” When Lola was untrue to him, “he didn’t care because he had Alice Young.” Alice Young was to Alice White as Lola was to Clara. Fleming didn’t cast White in any of his pictures—even Mervyn LeRoy, not the most exacting director, said “she was never much of an actress” and couldn’t remember where to move without “an off-camera semaphore system.” But Fleming helped her secure the female second lead in Paramount’s adaptation of Anita Loos’s smash novel
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
(1928). He and White looked “perfectly devoted,” according to the
Los Angeles Times,
at the film’s premiere, but White dismissed engagement talk. “And when Alice ‘pooh’s’ you, you cer
tainly
stayed poohed,” the reporter noted. Lu Rosson held a luncheon party for White at the Montmartre Café in mid-November, but there was still no engagement announcement, and by Christmas the relationship was over. It’s hard to tell who poohed whom. White was no more than a dalliance for Fleming, and Fleming a comfort or amusement for her.