Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (32 page)

Now Clark was a husky guy and a good sport, but it was not practical for him to be a hero and hold me up for the hour or so the shot would take to line up and shoot. So first of all, a stool had to be found which was the correct height to support most of my weight. Out of sight, of course; they were cutting about elbow high.

A prop man and a carpenter shoved a stool under my bottom as Clark hoisted me up, his right arm supporting me under my knees, his left under my shoulders.

From behind the camera: “Too high! Too high! Her head’s gotta be lower than his.” The carpenter started in with a saw on one of the legs.

“Wait a minute! Check it in the finder, first. Let’s see where you’re going to be, kids.”

“Clark, just before you kiss her, swing her an inch or two, so we get your full face.”

We tried it.

Vic said, “Too much, too much—back just a little.” Peering through the camera lens.

Clark said, “It’s uncomfortable. I’ll never hit it right.”

“Yes, you will. Just clear the key light on her neck, see it?”

“Why don’t you move the camera?” asked Clark.

“I don’t want to move the camera. It’s a natural move, Clark.”

“OK, OK.”

. . .

[During a break, while the stand-ins took the set] I had my usual bad-tempered argument with the makeup man about too much makeup. He pursued me, carrying a powder puff like an extension of his arm.

Soothingly he said, “The freckles are coming through on your forehead, Mary. Let me just touch it up with a
leetle
bit of pancake.”

“OK, but no lipstick, Harry—you know what Mr. Fleming said. All that rain. I’d never have any makeup left.”

“
Looks so naked.”

“That’s what he wants.”

. . .

[For the rehearsal] I hoisted myself onto the stool. As Clark took his position he cracked, “Hey, you’ve lost weight!”

The head gaffer, kneeling under the camera, asked Clark, “This gonna be too hot?” Indicating an eyelight.

“Gee-sus it is hot,” Clark replied. “It’ll make me squint, Gus.”

“No it won’t. We really need it.”

“Then it’s not too hot. Whadja ask for?”

The gaffer grinned and said, “Got anything in the fifth on Saturday?”

“Yeah, I gotta honey.”

“Lemme in on it, huh?”

“Sure, later.”

Finally Vic came in from behind the camera so that he could talk to us quietly. And we started to think about the scene. What happened previously, relationships, emotional levels, etc.

“Let’s just move through it once,” Vic says. “The look needn’t be very long, Clark. Mary, keep it simple. Real. Just
be
there.”

He turned and disappeared behind the lights.

“Let’s make one, okay?” He calls. “Don’t need a rehearsal. Just mean it. Think. Feel.” To the camera crew: “Can we go?”

Hal Rosson didn’t like that. “No rehearsal? Well, let me check their position when they kiss. We could move in, you know.”

Vic said, “I don’t
want
to move in, goddam it. I don’t want to move the camera. Let the
people
do it, not the camera.”

Rosson interrupted to say, “Give us a look, people.”

Clark leaned his head close to me and our lips were barely touching. Loudly, he asked, “How’s this?” I jumped a little and he said, “Sorry, baby.”

“No good. We’re just getting the top of your head.”

We maneuvered fractional changes, our noses getting in the way.

“
Hold it, hold it! That’s fine, if you raise her just a little—too much, too much. Right there, that’s beautiful, perfect.”

Clark whispered to me, “That’s where we were in the first place.”

The assistant director checked his watch. It was getting close to lunch time. “OK, can we go? Let’s wet ’em down!”

Clark said, “Here we go, baby,” as we unwound and he helped me down from the stool.

We went over and stood just off the set in a shallow bathtub arrangement made of tarpaper and two by fours, and the man in the raincoat turned the hoses on us. After the heat of the lights, the water felt icy and we gasped and yelled as it hit us.

The assistant said, “Let’s go, let’s go! Let’s get ’em while they’re wet!” The makeup man popped in to wipe a drop from the end of my nose. “Git outta there, Harry!”

Now it was quiet. Now we were ready to go. To do what they paid us all that money for. To use our acquired ability to concentrate, to focus all our thoughts and emotions on the scene.

This is what they’ll see up there on the screen in the theaters, although that isn’t what you think of at the time. The best way I can describe what happens is with the phrase, “as though”; we think and act “as though.” As though at that moment we were in the grip of an emotion bringing us violently together in the first taste of lips . . .

Somebody’s laughing. Out there behind the lights.

It was pin-drop silence. Then somebody chuckled from behind the camera. Clark’s head jerked up, shocked, mad. Then the whole crew started laughing into loud guffaws.

Vic said, “Cut it! Cut it!” then came in to us. “It’s a very hot scene, kids, but not
that
hot! You’re steaming!”

And we were, literally. The hot lights had vaporized the water on our clothes and skin, and it was rising in waves.

After the laughter and kidding and the joke was over, the problem remained. Everybody made a suggestion to solve it.

Then there was the question of lunch time. After lunch we were scheduled to move to another set—a “dry” scene. During lunch time I was to have my hair set and a new makeup. If we
waited
until after lunch to get this sequence shot, the production would be held up for at least an hour for the hairset and makeup renewal. And time was valuable.

The problem was solved. The water had to be heated. Since the source for the hoses couldn’t be heated, we simply stayed in position with the lights on until we stopped steaming. To prevent our drying out, [the propman Harry Edwards] kept us wet by pouring teakettles of warm water over our heads and shoulders.

To the assistant director [Hugh Boswell], who must keep things on schedule, it’s all very hurry-up, very urgent. But the situation has given the rest of us the sillies. Somebody says, “Clark, wanna deck of cards? You and Mary could play a hand of gin rummy while you’re waiting!”

And all the time the assistant director is chanting, “Can we go? Can we go, fellas?”

There’s a muscle in my shoulder that’s beginning to complain. “Can I stand up a minute?” I ask.

“No, Mary,” Vic says. “We’re all set. Don’t move out of it. Wet ’em down a little more.” The warm water dribbles on our hair. Clark says, “What, no soap?”

“Okay, roll ’em!”

And the scene was shot . . . And it was a print. “Lunch everybody. One hour! Crew back in a half hour.”

The weird part of it all is that it never occurred to anyone, including Clark and me, that all this might have had a bad effect on the mood, or on our ability to play a love scene convincingly. But that’s the way it was. The way it always is. The way it is today, on any movie set.

Under Fleming’s guidance, Gable and Astor did manage to conjure a suitable romantic cataclysm for Dennis and Barbara—and after it, for a while, Vantine hovers around the edges. Harlow, though, earns her star billing as Vantine deftly deflates the lovers’ high-flown image of themselves. She’s a marvelous clown, slapping around naked in the plantation’s big water barrel. Carried away with good humor and exuberance, the nude Harlow shot up on her feet in the rain barrel and proclaimed, “Something for the boys in the lab!” Knowing that the footage would get around, Fleming jerked the film right out of the
camera.
It was one of those times when the assistant director Willard Sheldon saw two facets of Fleming at once: “Very hard-nosed, yet he had this sensitive side which always surprised me.” He helped Harlow imbue Vantine with an understated poignancy, especially when Dennis offhandedly treats her like a whore. The wardrobe man Ted Tetrick said, “I felt he pulled things out of people based on what he wanted. Never above, never below.”

When her partners praised Harlow’s timing, they weren’t merely talking about her ability to put over Mahin’s crackling innuendos and euphemisms, such as Vantine scraping the bottom of a parrot’s cage and asking, “What have you been eating, cement?” Harlow’s Vantine is magnetic when Dennis puts her down and she struggles to show him that she could be the right gal for him—without airs and ambitions, she can buck him up as he does his duty. Dennis has built his authority by displaying strength and loyalty in an unforgiving land; he comes to realize that he can be honorable with the whore, not with the pedigreed married woman. And that comprehension hurts. The jolly ending carries a tinge of pathos. Dennis looks happy with Vantine; still, when he fleetingly recalls Barbara, he looks wounded.

If the stars were “playing themselves,” Harlow would have been the wounded one. Midway through filming, on Labor Day 1932, her husband committed suicide, when she was in their house and would find his body. Just two months before, Harlow had married Paul Bern, a literate MGM executive and Thalberg’s dearest friend. On paper, he seemed a good prospect to provide a stable family life. Bern, though, was deeply troubled and impotent. As Harlow’s biographer David Stenn uncovered in his analysis of this tragic scandal, the MGM damage-control machine, normally so reliable at protecting the studio’s human assets, delayed the arrival of police and raised suspicions of a cover-up. It would take weeks to deflate the suspicion that Harlow drove her husband to suicide. Production resumed two days later, as Fleming shot around Harlow and staged scenes with Gable, Astor, and Raymond. It was possible that Harlow would be replaced and her scenes reshot. Mayer offered her role to Tallulah Bankhead, who called his doing so “one of the shabbiest acts of all time.” But during the week, emerging details of Bern’s life before Harlow, such as his previous, common-law marriage to a woman who was obsessed with him, began to swing public feeling Harlow’s way. On Monday, September 12, Harlow returned to the set.

MGM’s
efficient publicists got a story out to the papers that Harlow had telephoned Irving Thalberg on September 11. “This staying around home is driving me crazy,” she said. “I’ve got to get busy—to forget.” Her stepfather, Marino Bello, and a nurse, Adah Wilson, accompanied her. The sound mixer Bill Edmondson said, “The day she came back, she was really subdued, and for the Baby to be subdued was
something.
” Astor reported that Fleming asked, “How are we going to get a sexy performance with
that
look in her eyes?” Yet she deflected any show of sympathy and was, as Edmondson put it, “a trouper.”

According to Mahin, it was Harlow’s sad luck that the next day required retakes of the rain-barrel scene. One of her feisty, laugh-getting lines was “Don’t you know? I’m La Flamme, the gal that drives men mad!” Mahin said she asked, “I don’t have to say that, do I?” His response: “I’m sure you don’t.” In Mahin’s account, Fleming shot that bit, but didn’t use it. Another report says that Stromberg and Fleming had begun auditioning alternative actresses; when Harlow made her reentrance, Gable was rehearsing a test scene with one of them. Harlow tapped the woman on the shoulder and said, “I’m sorry, honey, but the part’s taken.” In this version, Harlow’s first comeback line was Van-tine’s sardonic statement upon seeing Dennis return from Gary’s drainage project: “Well, if it ain’t old massa Fred, back after all these years.”

When he wasn’t dealing with turmoil and temperament on the set, Vic was wooing Lu Rosson—though his daughter Victoria says Lu was the one with courtship on her mind. It was unusual—perhaps unprecedented—for Fleming to bed a married woman, especially the wife of a friend. Yet Arthur Rosson and Lu had been living apart for half a year, since he moved out of their Rexford Drive home in Beverly Hills and into his own place. And something about the adrenaline-pumping whoosh and excitement of Vic’s life in these months connected with Lu’s inchoate yearning for a change.

“I think she was just an unhappy woman,” says Victoria. “She was unhappy in her first marriage, and I don’t think she ever had plans to move forward, at any time.” But Vic and Lu shared similar struggling childhoods, including limited schooling and the early loss of a father. Both had an instinct for jokes that defused situations or exploded them. Fired up from his expedition with Lewis, in the middle of bringing to life a movie with a volcanic id and a complicated view of adultery,
Fleming
may have allowed the intensity he always poured into his work to spill over, with Lu’s abetting, into their friendship.

Vic was collaborating with Arthur’s brother Hal when he started his affair with Lu. It’s surprising partly because, in the words of Cecil B. DeMille, “there was never a family of more vividly distinct individuals, neither was there ever a family of more close-knit unity and loyalty.” (He said he always thought of them as “The Rossons.”) Arthur and Lu’s marriage may have started to fall apart in the late 1920s. In 1927, Paramount had initially assigned him to
Underworld,
the Ben Hecht–written gangster movie. But Hawks, who was at Paramount then, said, “He went up to San Francisco, as I remember, to go to the prison there, but unfortunately got tight, so they had to fire him.” The director Josef von Sternberg took over (with Hathaway as his assistant director) and turned the film into a smash. By 1929, Rosson was directing Hoot Gibson cowboy talkies at Universal. Shooting Westerns took Art away from home, often to Arizona.