Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (30 page)

Lu Fleming’s great-granddaughter Kate Harper, a relation to the DeMilles through her mother’s marriage, knew Katherine well in her later years and thought her “a gracious and dignified woman” who “deserved far better than Quinn’s Mexican machismo.” Quinn is the sole source for the fling with Katherine, but Fleming
was
operating at high energy in every way throughout the early 1930s. He hatched a new travel plan and travelogue with Fairbanks when the friends reunited at the Hotel Del Mar in San Diego. The round-the-world trip had inspired Fleming to propose a bolder, less jokey documentary, centering on a pontoon plane tour of South America, down the Amazon. As if talking about our era’s reality-TV craze, Fairbanks touted “
natural adventure
” and boosted the notion that “
the new fiction is fact.
” But the trip and the movie never happened—it was probably too risky for Fairbanks—and its demise cooled the friendship. Edward Hartman says his
father
grumbled that Fairbanks lacked Fleming’s relish for hard labor: when the friends went to work on Fleming’s boat in Newport, “Vic got down on the deck and we sanded and sanded, but Fairbanks would disappear someplace.”

Shortly after he returned, Fleming took what would be the most momentous step in his career by signing his first contract with MGM. At the same time, he slaked his thirst for adventure by buying the aircraft that had been chosen for the Amazon adventure. The black and orange Lockheed Sirius, a muscular low-wing monoplane, was the same model that Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh had used to map international plane routes. Lockheed had built this particular plane for the Baltimorean Charles Hutchinson—he hoped to break a New York–to–Paris speed record, but instead crashed the plane on its first flight (he pleaded lack of ease with its controls). Fleming poured money into retooling it for shorter distances. With a forty-two-foot wingspan, it was bigger and more difficult to operate than Fleming’s previous aircraft. He flew it with Douglas Shearer (MGM’s sound chief and Norma’s brother) as his co-pilot, but the plane was beset with mechanical problems, including a cracked oil tank that forced a landing in Reno. Within two years, he sold it back to Lockheed. His experience with this monoplane would plant the seeds for one of his critical and commercial triumphs,
Test Pilot,
at his new studio.

13

Guiding Gable in
Red Dust

On October 2, 1931, Fleming received the most important document of his professional life. MGM delivered a letter of agreement for him to direct “one photoplay” within a seventeen-week period for a salary of $40,000. (Several days later,
Variety
announced that MGM had showered him with fifteen scripts.) For most of the 1930s, similar notes would fly back and forth between Vic’s lawyers and the studio, because he resisted any long-term contract.

Fleming would soon become
the
MGM director. In 1971, for an oral history project at Columbia University, the producer Pandro S. Berman, who joined MGM in 1940, was asked whether the reputations of MGM’s big directors should really have gone to the producers. “I would say except in the case of one man,” Berman said. Who was that? asked Charles Higham. Vincente Minnelli? Not to this producer’s eyes. “Victor Fleming was such a powerful man and so strong that he wouldn’t do anything until it was his way,” said Berman.

Fleming would thrive equally under his old pal Thalberg and his new admirer Louis B. Mayer. But Fleming’s first MGM picture,
The Wet Parade
(1932), was an intolerable Thalberger—a barely viewable film made out of an unreadable book. Upton Sinclair, who had earned his reputation as a muckraker by exposing tainted meat-processing plants in
The Jungle,
had personal reasons for writing this exhausting fictional screed against John Barleycorn: alcoholism took his father’s life.

Sinclair had no illusions about his Prohibition propaganda. He admitted, “When I finish my very bad Prohibition novel, I hope to write a very good one about Russia.” Not only did anti-Prohibition voices like H. L. Mencken mock the novel; so did his sometimes sycophantic friend Fulton Oursler (
The Greatest Story Ever Told
), who advised, “For God’s sake, throw it in the fire.”

Nonetheless,
Thalberg paid $20,000 for the rights and paid Fleming twice that much to direct it. Fleming gave the project his all, even when kidney stones once again began to plague him. They incapacitated him on and off throughout the 1930s, with severe pain that could make him short-tempered. The only long-term solution then was surgery, which he eventually had. But during
The Wet Parade,
he managed to keep functioning despite the attacks. The script clerk Morris Abrams said the director “came to work on a [tiltboard] with armrests like actresses used and was carried from set to set. He wouldn’t quit work.”
The Wet Parade
’s ingenue, Dorothy Jordan, remembered him as a “very sensitive, very dedicated man . . . basically, he was a big person. He never did petty things or little things.”

Mary Craig Sinclair wrote that in a meeting with her and her husband, Upton, Thalberg “explained that he could not make a Prohibition picture, but gave his word that he would hold the balance fair and give both sides. He did this, and with excellent results.” The Sinclairs—but few others—were satisfied. In a tale of two families ruined by alcohol, Robert Young and Jordan play the juvenile leads, and Jimmy Durante plays Young’s partner when the hero becomes a Prohibition agent. Durante’s crack for a
Photoplay
columnist, “They’re grooming me for drama, so they can save John Barrymore’s salary,” is sprightlier than any line in the script. Myrna Loy played a small part, and all this Fleming fan had to say about the production was that the Cyrano-like Durante kept staring at her pert nose off camera and exclaiming, “Moyna, where’d you get that schnozzola?” Walter Huston does give a memorable performance as a dangerous blowhard, a Democratic ward politician (Young’s father); the only indelible scene is his brutal murder of his wife (Clara Blandick, later Auntie Em in
The Wizard of Oz
). The screenwriter, John Lee Mahin, said that the film tanked “because it didn’t take a stand.” Well, that’s one reason.

From this unpromising beginning grew a director-studio alliance and a writing-directing partnership that extended to most of Fleming’s top sound films, including
Red Dust, Bombshell,
and
Captains Courageous.
Mahin, the son of a leading advertising executive ( John Lee Mahin Sr.), was born in Winnetka, Illinois, in 1902, and moved with his family to New York when he was sixteen. He attended Harvard, reviewing movies for the Boston
American,
but dropped out after two and a half years to work as a full-time newspaperman in New York.

“I think it’s the best thing in the world,” he said, “because you’ve
got
to write something every day . . . Getting your stuff edited, you learn terseness. You realize how important editing is.” Mahin entered show business as an actor—“a thin, reedy juvenile,” he said. He had a bit part in Eugene O’Neill’s
Great God Brown
and appeared with Robert Montgomery and Hume Derr, soon to be Mahin’s first wife (of five), as a song-and-dance team in
Bad Habits of 1926.
When Montgomery’s solo success broke up the act, Mahin and Derr married and moved upstate to restore a country house in Rockland County; Mahin commuted to New York to write copy at an ad agency while doing magazine fiction on the side. He regularly met Ben Hecht, who lived in Nyack, on the West Forty-second Street Ferry, and one day in 1928 Hecht announced that he and his playwriting partner, Charles MacArthur (then nicknamed “Nutsy”), the hottest writers on Broadway after the success of
The Front Page,
were going to Hollywood to write a film for Sam Goldwyn (
The Unholy Garden
). Hecht asked Mahin if he’d like to come along: “work with us, give us something to sneer at.” Mahin went as Hecht’s “secretary.” As Mahin’s eldest son, Graham, remembers the story, the three writers went on the 20th Century Limited, his mother left from La Guardia Field on a DC-3, and Graham and his governess traveled on the Cunard Line via the Panama Canal. When Mahin assisted Hecht on
Scarface
two years later, it made the young man’s name.
The Wet Parade
was one of the first films he wrote for MGM. F. Scott Fitzgerald would come to regard Mahin as “one of the half dozen best picture writers in the business” (the only other screenwriter Fitzgerald singled out by name was Robert Riskin).

Mahin was urbane. Fleming was elemental. Mahin could be a two-fisted drinker—he carried the spirit of the Jazz Age all the way through the Depression and World War II—but he couldn’t handle his booze. Vic could handle his
and
Mahin’s. Graham Mahin said, “My dad was a drunk. I mean, he was a Hollywood drunk, like most of the people were. Like Duke [John Wayne] was a drunk, like Ward Bond was a drunk, like all those guys, but, you know, it was fashionable to drink a lot . . . My father had this thing when he was drinking; he would just open the car door wherever he was and pee. It could be in the middle of an intersection. But Victor would say, ‘Now, John, we can’t do that.’ And Dad would get back inside.” Mahin himself said he and Fleming knew each other “the way women do when close . . . If I was in trouble, Vic and I would see each other that night.”

Over
the years, Mahin stood up consistently for Fleming’s character and talent, but to his son Graham, Mahin never downplayed the dark corners of his friend’s life. “Everywhere you went, really strange shit happened with Victor,” he once said. John recalled the two of them visiting a saloon and brothel in Mexico when Fleming noticed a new man behind the bar. Victor asked, “What happened to the other bartender that was here?” The new guy answered, “He was fooling around with a pistol and shot himself.” Fleming replied, “You’re kidding—how’d he do that?” The fellow picked up a pistol from behind the counter to demonstrate—and shot himself. As Mahin’s story went, he and Fleming sped out of there.

Whenever Mahin was in a fix, Fleming could get him out of it. Mahin once nearly lost an eye in a car accident, when the rearview mirror broke in his face while he shielded his wife. Fleming wouldn’t let the local doctors take the eye out—“just put it together with cotton,” he growled—and got a specialist to fly down from Canada. (“It was always funny,” Graham recalled. “I mean, it worked, but when he got very tired or anything, it would wander off and go into his head.”)

Professionally, the pair’s reliance was mutual. “Victor would talk about something, about dialogue,” remembers Graham, “and my father would say to him, ‘Verbs, Victor, verbs. You and the cameraman give the adjectives, just verbs is what we want.’ ” Howard Hawks, who took credit for introducing Mahin to Fleming, said, “He had a lot of talent, but he worked well only when he was with me or Victor Fleming or somebody like that—he had to be told what to write, and then what he wrote was really good.” Hawks’s condescension may have come from Mahin’s willingness to call Hawks an awful liar whenever he took credit for Fleming and Mahin’s work. Fitzgerald, again, wrote admiringly, “A Bob Sherwood picture, for instance, or a Johnny Mahin script, could be shot by an assistant director or a script girl.” Mahin saw himself as a yarn spinner, not a technician. He told novelist-screenwriters like Scott Fitzgerald and James M. Cain, “I never wrote ‘close shot,’ ‘long shot,’ ‘medium shot’ or anything . . . It’s all horseshit. You write your story; you’re a storyteller; write the dialogue where it should take place and if you have a good director he’ll start with a closeup and pull back, or whatever.”

Mahin’s preference for a script full of verbs would help Fleming fulfill his appetite for on-screen action. Fred E. Lewis, a wealthy real-estate investor, world traveler, hunter, and amateur zoologist, would
help
Fleming satisfy his yen for real-life adventure. “Restlessness, I suppose, is an emotion which one shouldn’t try to explain,” Fleming said in
Action.
“You have it or you don’t, and it has varying effects on different people.”

In 1930, Fleming and Charles Cotton, along with Lewis, bought a strip of bayfront property in a Southern California coastal town, Balboa, and built luxurious vacation homes. Lewis, unlike Fairbanks, was the real thing when it came to sailing, and he was much more than another Carl Akeley. It is likely that he was Fleming’s own Disko Troop, a living prototype for the seasoned skipper in
Captains Courageous.
Nine years older than the director and born into Gilded Age wealth in New York, Lewis was a charismatic naturalist in the era in which zoos still relied on wealthy patrons not only to build their facilities but also, at times, to supply the animals themselves. Collecting baby mammals typically meant killing one or more of their parents, meaning that Lewis also had the skills of a big-game hunter.

Right after
The Wet Parade,
Fleming leaped at the chance to join him for an animal-collection voyage on his diesel-powered yacht, the
Stranger,
which Lewis had custom-fitted to transport live animals. Lewis had planned a five-month sail to collect walrus, reindeer, and perhaps some bears in Alaska. As they headed into Alaskan waters, Fleming, off the starboard bow, “made out a ship through the glasses and her name was the
Nanuk.
Aboard her was W. S. Van Dyke, my fellow director . . . He was, with his crew and technicians, freezingly engaged in filming the picture
Eskimo.
”

The expedition ended up hauling away a three-hundred-pound baby walrus, three black bear cubs, three reindeer, and two Kodiak bear cubs for the San Diego Zoo. The Kodiak cubs were captured after Fleming shot their mother, who weighed nearly a ton. Fleming had the bear pelt made into a rug and put it in his bedroom during his second marriage. “I used to enjoy rolling around in it,” says his daughter Victoria.

Fleming, needing to return to Hollywood, cut his adventure short after that, flying home from Juneau. He quickly committed to direct
The White Sister,
a remake of the high-toned Italy-set soap opera that had been a silent hit with Ronald Colman and Lillian Gish. But MGM had a drifting production called
Red Dust
that needed an immediate course adjustment. Wilson Collison’s 1927 play pivoted (in far different ways from the finished movie) on a sexual triangle—the brusque,
competent
manager of a rubber plantation in Cochin China (present-day Vietnam), a prostitute from Saigon, and the classy wife of the manager’s new specialist in surveying. The setting was exotic; the material, turgid. Early plans to have Fred Niblo direct Garbo in the picture (with several different projected co-stars) went nowhere. Perhaps because of the French colonial backdrop, the producer, Hunt Stromberg, next put Jacques Feyder in charge; the Belgium-born director had made an acclaimed French silent version of Zola’s
Thérèse Raquin
in addition to Garbo’s last silent film,
The Kiss.
Now Jean Harlow was to play the streetwalker, with one of the silent screen’s great lovers, John Gilbert, as the hero. In the talkie era, without stage experience or sound technicians who knew how to mike his light and charming voice, Gilbert had grown unsteady. Teaming him with Harlow was supposed to buck him up.