Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (24 page)

When Howard Hawks directed
The Cradle Snatchers
in 1927, he inserted a shot of a business card for “The Club 400” with the name “Victor Flemen [
sic
]” scrawled on it. Fleming was becoming such a hot property for Paramount that this humorous personal reference was more like an industry shout-out. After the back-to-back critical-commercial success of
The Way of All Flesh
and financial sensation of
Hula,
Paramount turned to Fleming with hopes of committing box-office larceny: transferring the mammoth stage take of the 1924 Broadway smash,
Abie’s Irish Rose,
to the movie box office. In the twenty-first century, that title may not set off reverberations the way it did in the twentieth, but for decades any proper Jewish boy bringing home a fetching Gentile girl was apt to hear his parents call her Abie’s Irish Rose.

The dubious credit for that moniker goes to the playwright Anne Nichols’s ghetto-garish hunk of mawkish, stereotypical humor, in which every Jew is materialistic and every Irishman is raring for a fight. Of course, there’s a treacly sweetness behind the concept. The differences between the widower-fathers of Abie Levy and Rosemary Murphy dissolve in the sight of their children’s happiness and twin grandchildren’s beauty. The material would be more persuasive if it didn’t make you feel that the human ingredients of the melting pot were atavism, greed, suspicion, and stupidity. But the play struck a thunderous pipe-organ chord on Broadway and across the country. Paramount’s Lasky wrote, “Practically every major studio in Hollywood was bidding for
Abie’s Irish Rose.
In order to grab the plum for ourselves I finally offered the highest price we had ever put out for a play or book—$500,000 against 50 per cent of the profits.” To seal the deal, he succumbed to all of Nichols’s demands, including approval over “cast, screen play, wardrobe, advertising.”

Only partial prints of the movie exist, but even in abbreviated form it’s slow going—the equivalent of the over-elaborate stage-to-screen transcriptions produced in the wake of
The Sound of Music
(1965). Ernst Lubitsch, who had recommended that Warner Bros. buy
The Jazz
Singer,
went to Paramount when Lasky won the bidding war for
Abie’s Irish Rose
and was reported to be favored to direct it. It would have been an insane choice—the Lubitsch touch was sophisticated, not gemütlich. But as ever in Hollywood, an expensive, supposedly “pre-sold” product backed at the highest levels of a studio exerted its own magnetism.

The film provided a welcome career jolt for Nancy Carroll. After appearing as Roxie Hart in a Los Angeles production of
Chicago
and being screen-tested all over town, she needed this kind of launch to become one of the true comic sirens of her era in films like the 1930 classic
Laughter.
Handpicked by Nichols after she stomped off the lot, fed up by high-handed treatment, Carroll said she had “one great trouble in that picture: it was difficult for me to cry.” Luckily for her—and amusingly for social-cultural historians who major in bias and prejudice—J. Farrell MacDonald, who played her father, “stood just off the set, and talked in a low voice about being heartbroken because his little girl was going to marry a Jewish boy. He looked so exactly like my father would have looked if I had married one that I burst into volumes of tears. I cried so hard that I stained my baby face, and the shot had to be retaken.”

Charles “Buddy” Rogers, the co-star of
Wings
and later the third husband of Mary Pickford, took the role of Abie, epitomizing the Hollywood tradition of “write Jewish, cast Gentile,” even in an ethnic comedy. (“Do it this way . . . Do it
my
way,” Fleming would bark at him.) It makes sense that Carroll and Rogers look relaxed only in France during World War I, when Rosemary sings at a YMCA hut and Abie, impromptu, plays the piano for her. Back in the States, the avalanche of bad comic dialogue proves that you
can
stop the music.
Variety
’s pan of
Abie’s Irish Rose
as “two hours and ten minutes of title gags” was one of the most astute critiques the trade paper has run in its long history. It also “outed” its pseudonymous reviewer, “
Rush,
” with the tagline explanation, “(
Rush,
Al Greason, is of the Protestant faith).”

Of course, Protestants have a pivotal symbolic role to play in
Abie’s Irish Rose,
too; as soon as Rosemary arrives from California and meets Abie in New York, he turns to a Methodist minister in New Jersey to marry them. It’s as if a tolerant Waspishness were the social-cultural ideal toward which all ethnic subcultures must tend. Fleming can’t separate the movie’s heartiness from its bogusness: there’s something inescapably fraudulent about the ease with which Jewish and Catholic
chaplains
meet on the battlefield and conclude that Jew, Christian, and Muslim all cry out at journey’s end for the same God. (The chaplains, of course, turn out to be Levy’s rabbi and Murphy’s priest.) When cultural benchmarks appear dated, it’s tempting to view them as relics from innocent times, but even as a stage piece
Abie’s Irish Rose
was widely reviled, and
Variety
was right on top of its shortcomings as a movie:

The laborious sentimental play upon bigotry, continued reference to the brotherhood of Jew, Celt and the rest of mankind—including the Mohammedan—is wearisome, and seems for the most part to have been pushed in. Under the Constitution, and specifically in the subway rush hours, these things go without saying. There is something also not so very tactful about the elaborate technical exactitude of the Jewish and Roman customs, even to the point of assuring the audience in a program note that a real rabbi and a real priest acted as expert advisors in these details. If these things are right they will speak for themselves to such auditors as are concerned in their correctness.

The Danish-born character actor Jean Hersholt, who plays Solomon Levy, achieves a weary authenticity. (Hersholt became better known for his altruism; Buddy Rogers, his Abie, won the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1986.)

Working again with his
Way of All Flesh
screenwriter, Furthman, Fleming did what he could to energize the movie under Nichols’s constraints. Apart from a few transitions—such as fading from battling schoolboys to marching troops—and some shots of the Yanks in France that have a
Big Parade–
like heft, Fleming’s efforts proved feeble. He may have been weakened by his first reported attack of kidney stones; propman Joseph C. Youngerman said, “I had to hold a glass of water in front of him every half hour.” When the movie opened, it was,
Rush
later reported, “an utter flop” as a two-dollar-a-ticket reserved-seat special. It left Lasky stunned: “I can’t understand why it didn’t do phenomenal business, since the picture was every bit as bad as the play!”—a nice quip, except that a bad play plastered on the screen makes for an even worse movie. By then, shrewder films patterned on the play, like the 1926 George Jessel vehicle,
Private Izzy Murphy,
might have tapped the ethnic-comedy market dry.

Also,
another stage epic of Jewish assimilation,
The Jazz Singer,
had opened on October 6, 1927, revolutionizing the medium and revving up audiences with a new ingredient: sound. Eight weeks after its April 19, 1928, premiere, Paramount pulled
Abie’s Irish Rose
out of circulation, added sound to a handful of sequences (including Carroll tap-dancing and singing “Rosemary” and “Little Irish Rose”), and shaved fifty minutes off its original 129-minute running time. Recalling the events four decades later, the cinematographer Hal Rosson confused
Abie’s Irish Rose
with
The Jazz Singer
when he told Leonard Maltin, “One of the things that we had was a death scene, and the Jewish boy’s father was a cantor (I hope I’m not mixing this up) and he sang the Kol Nidre. And when that hymn came from the loudspeaker in the projection room, it was a fantastic moment.” Actually, what Rosson shot was Hersholt chanting the mourner’s prayer, or Kaddish, for his shiksamarrying son. Al Jolson sang Kol Nidre for his dying cantor-father in
The Jazz Singer—
which really
was
the Kaddish for silent movies.

By the time
Abie’s Irish Rose
made its debut, Paramount had lent Fleming to Samuel Goldwyn for
The Awakening
(1928). Goldwyn designed this tale as the first solo vehicle for Hungary’s blond beauty Vilma Banky, who’d previously enjoyed success co-starring with Ronald Colman. She starred as Marie, a pure Alsatian peasant girl who rouses the anger of her countrymen when she falls in love with a German lieutenant (Walter Byron) before the outbreak of World War I. Influenced by the Lillian Gish–Colman hit
The White Sister
(later remade by Fleming with Helen Hayes and Clark Gable), another story with an injured soldier-hero and a heroine who enters a religious order, the movie premiered with a synchronized score, including an Irving Berlin theme song, “Marie.” (The song survives not in its original waltz tempo but in the lively Jimmy Dorsey version from the 1930s; the movie has been lost.)

Never content to exploit one star when he could also be nurturing another, Goldwyn brought his French discovery Lili Damita to
The Awakening
’s set. “When I first come [to Hollywood],” Damita told
Motion Picture,
“Mr. Goldwyn think I am lonesome so he bring over to dinner, Victor Fleming . . . Mr. Goldwyn think maybe eef I like someone here I can forget and not want to go back right away to Paris. We have our pictures taken together on the set—we eat dinners. He ees a good man to keep a woman from being lonesome.” (Errol Flynn would marry her in 1935.)

Fleming’s
main sexual playmate at this time was the twenty-year-old Lupe Velez, who’d co-starred with Fairbanks in
The Gaucho
and was making
Lady of the Pavements
for Griffith. “And Victor Fleming!” she told
Motion Picture.
“I like him because he is a devil with womens . . . But I am more than a devil than he is. That is why I never fall in love with him.” Of all Fleming’s dalliances, Velez may have been the least serious. Velez said of herself generally, “I have flirt with the whole film colony. Why not? I am not serious. What harm is a little flirting? No I do not kiss many mens. But when I kiss them, they stay kissed!”

Fleming was often seen with the author of
The Awakening
’s original story, Frances Marion, the former Hearst reporter who had become a favorite writer for stars like Mary Pickford and Norma Talmadge. Marion’s third husband, the cowboy actor Fred Thomson, had died on Christmas Day 1928 (of tetanus after a kidney stone operation). Fleming, a friend for a decade, joined other pals like Hedda Hopper and Marie Dressler in bolstering the spirits of Marion and her two sons. He took her to the wedding of the actors Ruth Roland and Ben Bard in March, and later dressed up as Jack to her Jill for a Marion Davies costume party at Davies’s Santa Monica estate.

Frances Marion and her fourth husband, the director George Hill, whom she married in 1930, figured in a story about Fleming and Louis B. Mayer that she made famous in her 1972 memoir,
Off with Their Heads.
The MGM film editors Blanche Sewell and Margaret Booth asked the directors and Marion to meet with a “tall, shy youth” in “a shabby suit” in a studio projection room. It was Walt Disney, who’d come to sell Mayer on the idea of distributing his cartoons. As soon as Fleming saw Disney’s Mickey Mouse short, he exclaimed, “It’s terrific!” and continued, with his long arms thrashing, “Man, you’ve got it! Damndest best cartoon I’ve ever seen! Let’s have the other one.” It was a Silly Symphony with “a garden in spring . . . a west wind blowing . . . the leaves on the trees stirring . . . then the flowers began dancing together like an exquisite ballet.” Hill and Fleming “praised it, though not with the enthusiasm they had lavished on Mickey Mouse.”

When Marion managed to drag Mayer into the screening room, the prancing flora disturbed Mayer—and Mickey Mouse turned Mayer’s stomach. “Goddamn it! Stop that film! Stop it at once! Are you crazy! Is this your idea of a practical joke? I’ve a mind to fire all of you!” Fleming snapped, “Keep your shirt on, L.B. What the hell’s the matter with you? Got elephant blood, you’re scared of a mouse?” Mayer defended him
self,
saying, “It ain’t myself I’m thinking about, it’s the poor frightened women in the audience . . . All over this country pregnant women go into our theaters to see our pictures and to rest themselves before their dear little ones are born . . . Every woman is scared of a mouse, admit it. A little tiny mouse, admit it. And here you think they’re going to laugh at a mouse on the screen that’s ten feet high, admit it. And I’m nobody’s fool and not taken in by your poor judgment.” He slammed the door on Mickey, Disney, and their new director-fans.

A great story, but is it true? For one thing, Mayer later launched a cartoon series about a cat and mouse, Tom and Jerry. It was Nicholas Schenck in New York, the head of MGM’s parent company, Loew’s, who nixed a Disney deal with Metro for the Mickey Mouse cartoons. And the way Marion told it, the disastrous meeting with Mayer took place in 1928—a year before Disney went to work on the Silly Symphony shorts. On the other hand, Disney did try to broker a deal with MGM again in 1930, when Fleming was on the move from Paramount and might have been looking for a deal from Mayer himself. Mickey was fresh on Fleming’s mind when he filmed his next picture (and last with Douglas Fairbanks),
Around the World in Eighty Minutes—
and included a cameo appearance by Disney’s plucky rodent.

Fleming noted of the Fleming-like director in
Bombshell
and the screen personalities he’d created, “If it were not for him they would not be where they are.” Fleming knew what made a star—whether it was a tiny animated mouse or a tall drink of water like Gary Cooper.

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