Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (28 page)

Nevertheless,
Renegades
has an arid visual grandeur—Fleming scouted the Mojave Desert locations in his own plane—and patches of scruffy vitality and humor. One shot of the four men crawling into a fort with their butts in the air boasts the same tense visual humor as the Cowardly Lion, Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Toto sneaking into the witch’s castle in
The Wizard of Oz.
The square-cut, angry Baxter and the slinky, teasing Loy sustain a crackling tension. Their dual erotic death foreshadows Jennifer Jones and Gregory Peck’s in Selznick and King Vidor’s
Duel in the Sun.
Loy called
Renegades
“a happy film”: Baxter had skill and charm, and Fleming was “a man’s man and master of his craft.” Before
Renegades,
Loy had been cast as “Burmese, Chinese, a South Seas islander, a couple of Mexicans, and . . . a Creole.” Even though she was playing a vamp again,
Renegades
pushed her into the mainstream.

Some of the fun took place off camera. Loy remembered:

I was supposed to operate a machine gun. One day on the set a man was explaining the apparatus to me, so simple it seemed a child could work it, and he told me to look through the sights and move the gun, to get the feel of it, I supposed. Victor Fleming, the director, happened to be standing near and almost directly in front of me. I sighted the gun and in moving it must have pressed the wrong thing, for it started shooting. There were blanks in it, of course, but the way both Mr. Fleming and I jumped one would have thought it really loaded with bullets. He jokingly intimated that there were probably several actors who would like to have been in my position with a loaded machine gun.

Lugosi imbues the warlord with a self-regarding ripeness that deflates Baxter’s vengeful fury and Loy’s canny, manipulative sexuality. The screenplay (by Furthman) hands Lugosi a refrain—“What do you
think?”—
that becomes funnier with every repetition. It’s always used after the Arab muses on some outrageous atrocity, such as “I’m going to crucify every dog of a Christian if taken alive, or maybe I just burn them in slow fire. What do you think?” The script required Lugosi’s chieftain to read the riot act to his native troops for losing ground, and the director wanted it done in a language not readily understandable to Americans. Lugosi’s torrent of exotic verbiage echoed through the desert and delighted Fleming—until, at a preview in New York, a large segment of the audience started howling with laughter. It was the star’s Hungarian-born fan base. When Fleming collared the theater operator for an explanation, the manager, who was also Hungarian, explained that Lugosi had been spouting in Magyar. A loose translation would run, “The hell with you sons-of-bitches. You are the lowest shits I’ve ever had anything to do with. You’re a lousy bunch of beggars. You are lower than the asshole of a drunken frog on a rainy day.” Fleming dubbed the imprecations into Arabic.

The year at Fox helped Fleming consolidate his mastery of the latest sound technology. If he saw his family infrequently, he was still a bountiful figure in their lives. After his niece Yvonne spent two years at UCLA, he paid for her to finish up at UC-Berkeley, then—thinking back to his Signal Corps days—he suggested, “Why don’t you go to Columbia? I think that you’d learn more there.” She didn’t want to go to a big city far away, and she did want to be part of Berkeley’s vaunted history department. “It was to be one year, but I had such a good time and was doing so well, I approached him again, and said I’d like to go back.” He said, “I was just going to buy a twin-engine plane, but I’ll buy a single-engine plane so you can go back to Berkeley.” She demurred; he insisted. “Well, I’ll do it,” he said, “and you just consider it my sacrifice.” Yvonne remembered, “That’s the way he talked. He was very generous, and very fond of Mother. I know she was his favorite.” In 1933, his cousin Clyde Hartman lost his painting business and became the Hartman family handyman, among his other odd jobs. Fleming reacted the way the rest of the family did, hiring Clyde for repair and construction work at his ranch.

Clyde’s son Edward, born in 1924, got privileged glimpses into Fleming’s life at Meadowlark Ranch. “I would either wash the walls, sand, or do prep work. Vic would do ranch work or meet with Mr. Frost, the caretaker. Mrs. Frost would do the cooking for us. We had a lot of canned tamales. I think Vic bought them by the carload.” Flem
ing
hadn’t lost his appetite for speed and his scorn for traffic cops. In his Pierce-Arrow, he’d drive to Encinitas down the Pacific Coast Highway—as Edward recalls, “A three-lane highway then, with a center lane for passing. When he’d hit it, he would barrel down the middle lane at something like sixty miles per hour before he turned onto a rural road that led to the ranch. Any time I was with him, the police never stopped him, but several times I remember he laughed because the police car was so far behind the officer didn’t see he had turned off. At times, it was scary. We never had much in the way of conversation, but he seemed to like the company.”

He was tight about money outside family circles. Blocksom once went “riding with him in his car down Wilshire Boulevard, and there was a new building, an auto dealership that was going up on the left side of the road, this beautiful building, this gorgeous auto dealership, and I said, ‘Gee, that’s good-looking,’ something like that, and he said, ‘I own that,’ and I said, ‘Oh, how wonderful,’ and he looked at me and said, ‘I want to tell you something right now. Don’t ever make a million dollars. Because you’ll never know who your friends are.’ ” (When Fleming said “I own that,” he meant he leased the lot; from Dodges to Nashes to Buicks, it was always a site for auto dealers, and is now Beverly Hills Porsche/Audi.)

No longer was he popping up in all the fan magazines as the favored beau of this or that starlet, but Bow had made him a focus for suspicions of romantic scandal. In 1932, for example, the
Los Angeles Examiner
investigated his supposed secret marriage in Mexicali to a nightclub dancer named Joan Blair. Blair’s mother said it was “all a joke, started by someone trying to kid the girl.” The newspaper checked it out nonetheless before shelving the item.

Bow would later say of Vic, “Of all the men I’ve known, there was a
man.
” In 1929, though, she got engaged to the singer Harry Rich-man, who’d had a hit singing Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ On the Ritz,” which eventually contained an encomium for another Bow lover, Gary Cooper (“Dressed up like a million-dollar trouper / Trying hard to look like Gary Cooper / Super duper”). The actress-turned-writer Patsy Ruth Miller, in her unpublished memoir, said, “I only met Clara Bow once, but that time was memorable. It was at the wedding reception, when I got married to Tay Garnett.” Garnett was about to direct the singer in a picture, and Miller “was curious to meet Harry Rich-man, whom I had seen in New York; he had a certain crude charm, twirling his top hat, prancing across the stage, and bellowing out the
latest
jazz.” It would have been impolite not to invite Bow, Richman’s betrothed. At the event, held in the backyard of her Beverly Hills home, Miller thought everyone could find a chair without place cards. The problem was that Bow plunked herself down in the bride’s seat of honor. Thinking quickly, Miller asked the studio trio she and Garnett had hired to stop playing Strauss waltzes. “They set to with gusto playing, if I remember correctly, Charleston, Charleston, da, da, de, da . . . It worked. Miss Bow began swaying in her seat, then, unable to resist the lure of the music, she rose and grabbed Harry Richman, and started doing the Charleston. Quick as a flash, I was in the chair at the head of my table.”

Miller, who became close friends with Fleming when she married her
next
husband, John Lee Mahin, said Vic “had what might be called an old-fashioned sense of chivalry, of courtesy toward women. He had sort of a protective attitude toward women which some modern girls might object to, but which I found very appealing. I never heard Victor say anything disparaging about a woman, even about Clara Bow . . . If asked about her [he] only said, ‘She’s a nice kid. A bit flighty, perhaps. But a sweet kid.’ ”

Bow sometimes blamed Cooper for her breakup with Fleming, just as Cooper blamed Fleming for his breakup with Bow. Another cowboy star, Rex Bell, would eventually stabilize her love life, but not even Bell could get her to settle down at this time. He was romancing the It Girl in California while newspapers were exploding with headlines about Bow’s 1930 trip to Dallas to see another long-term lover, a married Dallas urologist, Dr. William Earl Pearson. When the scandal was cresting in July, Fleming spotted Bell in the Fox commissary. “Hey, Rex!” he reportedly whooped. “How’s our girl?”

Meanwhile, Fleming was spending more time with Arthur and Lu Rosson. Especially Lu. The middle child of a German saloon keeper who had two other daughters and kept taverns first in Brooklyn, then on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, she was born Louise Irana Nieder-meyer (on March 22, 1895), later changing her first name to Lucile. When her dad died at age thirty-five of a burst appendix (in 1906), the family’s fortunes plunged. “They were
very
poor,” Sally Fleming says she was told. “And my grandmother insisted that they live on the top floor of a tenement on Ninety-third Street, near the Jacob Ruppert Brewery. She would send those three girls, in complete misery and embarrassment, to collect horse droppings to use for growing vegeta
bles
in a garden she kept on the roof.” Lu’s mother, Emily Nieder-meyer, was a talented cook (a gift she passed down to Lu). She took in boarders and served them “fantastic dishes.” She made the three girls’ clothes and raised them “in a strict Germanic fashion. You know, if they touched the silverware before dinner, they were sent away from the table. They didn’t have a lot of money, but they maintained their dignity.”

The clock tower of Ehret’s Hell Gate Brewery, topped with crossed beer barrels, loomed over the neighborhood. Lu’s family lived at 181 East Ninety-third Street; also struggling next door, in a three-room apartment at 179, were the Alsatian tailor Sam “Frenchie” Marx and his ambitious wife, Minnie, who nursed showbiz aspirations for their five sons, Leonard, Adolph, Julius, Milton, and Herbert. Thanks in part to their mother’s drive, the sons, renamed Chico, Harpo, Groucho, Gummo, and Zeppo after their move to Chicago in 1910, would succeed in vaudeville, Broadway shows, movies, radio, and television. Harpo described the block as “a small Jewish neighborhood squeezed in between the Irish to the north and the Germans to the south in Yorkville.” The side of it the Marxes (and the Niedermeyers) lived on was indeed, Harpo wrote, “the tenement side,” cruelly facing a string of “one-family brownstone townhouses.” (The block now borders the Carnegie Hill neighborhood made famous in numerous Woody Allen movies.)

“I’d like to be able to say that my mother knew the Marx Brothers growing up,” says Sally. “But she never spoke about them, and I don’t think she did. Her mother, from the stories I heard, was very reclusive.” Just to the south of them, Yorkville-bred Bert Lahr (born Irving Lahrheim, the son of a Prussian upholsterer) was reading penny dreadfuls and dreaming of the theater. Just to the north, that future Irish-American icon, James Cagney, was teaching himself how to hoof and also how to speak Yiddish. But Lu’s mother kept to herself (she didn’t know Plattdeutsch, the German dialect spoken by the Marxes
en famille,
or Yiddish, which increased her isolation). And her family had no propensity for showbiz. Lu’s older sister, Georgiana, went to work for the phone company at age seventeen. Lu left school in the seventh grade and by age fifteen had a job in an advertising agency as an office assistant.

Arthur Rosson, nine years older than Lu, was a movie-struck stock-exchange clerk. Within two years he was
in
movies at the Vita-
graph
studio in Brooklyn, working as a stuntman and sometime actor. Arthur and Lu got married on June 2, 1912, when Lu was three months pregnant. “Lu’s theory was, if you want to get married, get pregnant,” said Blocksom. In December, Lu gave birth to their daughter in Hoboken, New Jersey, and named her Helene, after Arthur’s mother. Then they started for California. By the time Fleming got to be their neighbor, in 1926, Arthur had won a reputation as a versatile director, able to shift from melodramas to frothy comedies; his brothers had solidly established themselves, too, Richard as an actor turned director and Hal as a stuntman turned cinematographer. Hal would shoot many movies for Vic, including
Abie’s Irish Rose;
Richard would get a co-director credit on Hawks’s
Scarface
and also contributed to Fleming’s
Joan of Arc;
Arthur got a co-director credit on Hawks’s
Red River.

Lu couldn’t have guessed that she was marrying into a moviemaking dynasty. The patriarch, Arthur Rosson Sr., was a British jockey turned coachman who married a Frenchwoman (Helene’s maiden name was Rochefort). He had worked for the banking titan J. Pierpont Morgan, and he curbed any family rowdiness with the threat of his riding crop. Maybe it was the zest and esprit of the family that made Arthur and his two brothers and three sisters quit jobs as clerks or office boys or stenographers and work in or around movies, first at Vitagraph in Brooklyn and then in California. Gladys, Art’s middle sister, was the only one who became an executive. The rest started out as stuntmen and/or actors; the men became directors, the other Rosson siblings, Ethel and Helene, homemakers after brief stints as silent-film actresses. But Gladys signed up as DeMille’s secretary in 1914, rose to the position of secretary-treasurer of his production company, and stayed with him until she died in 1953. She was also DeMille’s beloved “head mistress” of a three-woman platoon filled out by the screenwriter Jeanie Macpherson and the actress Julia Faye.

Fleming had known Arthur and Lu since before World War I. Fleming’s early moviemaking pals Allan Dwan and Wallace Reid directed and wrote a 1913 film that gave Arthur his first acting job in California and also featured Marshall Neilan in a bit part. Rosson started out as a Western director and retained a gritty reputation for knowing how to handle everything from canyon rock slides to cantankerous horses. Around the time Fleming moved to Beverly Hills, Rosson gave him a pistol that was supposed to have belonged to Pancho Villa. All the Rosson men were known as hale, inventive filmmakers.