Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (35 page)

The Rosson-Harlow nuptials were only the first in
Bombshell
’s talent base. Vic and Lu were next.

The circumstances were murky, but this much is known: Sometime between Vic’s return from the Lewis trip and his completion of
Bombshell
’s first cut, Lu told him she was pregnant. And on September 26, 1933, the day before the film’s first preview, he drove her 240 miles to Yuma, where Freeman married them, too. True to Fleming’s longstanding story that he announced his retirement after every movie, he gave his occupation on the license application as “Retired—from motion pictures.” They exchanged no wedding bands, and there was no honeymoon. According to Lu, Vic ordered Freeman, “Let’s leave the ‘love’ out of the ceremony.” Fleming drove back to California and deposited Lu at her old home. The marriage would stay secret for the next three months.

Some time and in some way after that, Lu told him she was not pregnant. The details of her mistake, deception, or self-deception only entered family lore in her sad tirades after Fleming’s death in 1949, when, Sally observes, “Mother would get six Schlitzes under her belt and start to tell horrible stories.” It’s possible that in panic, Lu had impulsively sprung the oldest marital trap in the world. She knew of examples close to home and
in
her home: Lu’s daughter Helene was two months pregnant when she married Jaime del Valle (later a famed radio director). And Mildred Harris had coerced Fleming’s friend and
neighbor
Charlie Chaplin into marriage under the pressure of a pregnancy that turned out to be false, too.

Fleming’s reaction was to tell Lu she could not share his Cove Way house until she was really pregnant. For nearly a year, she continued to use her old house as her social base and legal address until she did become pregnant the following May.

But Sally observes of those circumstances, “Let’s be honest about one thing. They were adults. They had been friends up to that point for several years. And that long friendship is what kept them together.”

Fleming gave no outward sign that he felt panicked or rushed into marriage. He rarely let his private complications get in the way of his job duties or amateur enthusiasms, and he didn’t then. He immersed himself in
Bombshell
when he returned from the Lewis trip, and on September 23, he even kept an appointment to join Charles Cotton in the California state skeet-shooting championship in Santa Monica. On October 6, he boarded the
President Hoover
in San Francisco, bound for Hawaii and another animal-collection voyage with Lewis. Married or not, he was going to take his usual post-film getaway, plans he had made weeks earlier. Taking Lu to Hawaii, where they would be greeted by ship news reporters, would have ended the secrecy.

Fleming ensconced himself at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu for a couple of weeks until Lewis sailed in from San Pedro, and then spent the next two months sailing around the Hawaiian islands with the millionaire oilman N. Paul Whittier and his wife, the silent actress Olive Hasbrouck. They collected specimens for San Francisco’s Steinhart Aquarium—yellow tang, butterfly fish, and moray eels—and were not scheduled to return until December. But another kidney stone attack forced Fleming to cut the trip short and sail back with Whittier on the luxury liner
Lurline.

With the notable exception of his “engagement” to Bow, Fleming had kept his personal life largely out of public view—maybe that’s why the real-life Space Hanlon, MGM’s Howard Strickling, thought he was “the shyest, most bashful guy.” Fleming separated parts of his existence from his extended family, too. His niece Yvonne said she and her family didn’t even meet Lu until well after the marriage. “We could never figure out why in the world he married her.”

A court case would force him into going public about the marriage—although not about its unusual living arrangement. In December, the MGM cameraman Paul Lockwood filed a $150,000
lawsuit
accusing Fleming of “alienating the affections” of his wife, Marjorie DeHaven, a pert, big-eyed brunette and sometime dancer. She was the daughter of the stage stars Carter DeHaven and Flora Parker, and the older sister of Gloria DeHaven.

Such lawsuits were common in Los Angeles in the depths of the Depression—practically a weekly occurrence—until California finally outlawed them. Lockwood contended that the director “debauched and carnally knew” his twenty-one-year-old wife, dangled the prospect of a film career, and had an unnamed friend lure her to San Francisco and then abandon her on October 4, two days before Fleming sailed for Hawaii.

Fleming and his lawyer, Howard Henshey, knew the suit was coming, so Henshey made what, for Fleming, was a rare phone call to publicize his marriage. On December 18, 1933, the same day Lockwood filed suit, Walter Winchell’s column reported in its typical slang that Vic and Lu “were secretly welded in Yuma months ago.” Newspapers jumped on both the lawsuit and the wedding announcement, and the story made national news, sometimes with a photo of Mrs. Lockwood in a demure pose. Henshey filed a point-by-point denial to the accusations.

Nothing came of it. The case was never heard. When Lockwood attempted to divorce his wife the following year, a different tale emerged. He charged that his wife had become “infatuated” with Fleming—not that they’d had sexual relations or that an unnamed man assisted the scheme—and that he found a note from her saying she was about to go to Honolulu with “her true love.” That’s when Lockwood drove to San Francisco with her father and found her there in a sanatorium. (If she had taken the same train as Fleming to San Francisco, it was not disclosed.)

Mrs. Lockwood never appeared in court for the divorce trial. Because she refused to undergo a court-ordered psychiatric examination, Judge Georgia Bullock, under the state law of the time, could not grant the divorce. (A divorce went through on other grounds in 1936.)

For every possible scenario, there’s a question, but no information to answer it: Did Fleming seduce a fragile woman in some erotic yet misogynistic panic of his own? Was studio pressure brought on Lockwood to alter his story, or was there a secret cash settlement? Did Fleming impulsively set up a sexual encounter, then change his mind? Was it all a legalized extortion attempt? Or did Mrs. Lockwood
become
so infatuated with Fleming that she followed him—and did this truth force Lockwood to revise his accusations?

The matter faded away, and Fleming reerected his wall of privacy. But Victoria used to hear jokingly from her half sister, Helene, that occasionally her father would find a woman hiding in his car in the studio parking lot. It was a recurring echo of the Lockwood case.

Meanwhile,
Bombshell
was turning into Fleming’s most contemporary, of-the-moment film since
Mantrap—
and its pace reflected the racing current of the director’s life. Louis B. Mayer’s cutting chief, Margaret Booth, said, “I worked alone [in the editing room] and then Fleming came in. He was a
wonderful
man”—and a daring director, in his prime. “Nobody had ever cut anything that fast; I cut it very snappy, which was unusual then. Everybody at the studio said, ‘Oh, it isn’t going to be any good.’ And of course it was terrific.” At least that’s how it played at its Hollywood premiere. “
Bombshell
was a SENSATION, a WOW, a SUCCESS, and what an evening,” wrote Harlow’s mother to Jean’s agent, Arthur Landau, even though Louis B. Mayer snubbed her daughter by stopping and saying only, “God, [Lee] Tracy has great lines.” In a night letter to Nicholas Schenck, Mayer urged him to hold the film back from release in order to build a proper campaign: “Don’t believe we should spend money on picture that has no possibilities but BOMBSHELL has not only star value but is truly great entertainment.”

In 1989, Booth confessed that at the film’s sneak previews, MGM thought it “a dud.” She said, “People then didn’t appreciate it like we do now. It’s more of a hit today.” After it opened, the manager of the Fox Granada Theater in Kansas City, Kansas, complained to Mayer, “Box office returns on
Bombshell
and
Lady Killer
indicate pictures on Hollywood are not wanted. Suggest you change title
Going Hollywood
to
Going Gay
or similar title.” For a knowing, urbane farce,
Bombshell
still did well—at $761,000, its gross more than doubled its $344,000 cost. And it had a far-reaching influence: the director Stanley Donen, his co-director and star, Gene Kelly, and his screenwriters, Betty Com-den and Adolph Green, screened
Bombshell
before they created
Singin’ in the Rain.
In its own time,
Bombshell
solidified Fleming’s reputation as one of the few directors who could do anything in sound that he did in the silents, from adventure to erotic melodrama to sophisticated farce.

15

Treasure Island

While Fleming was making his next picture, the quintessential pirate adventure,
Treasure Island,
Hollywood was going through an abrupt and concentrated climate change. The rising Hays Office censor Joseph Breen had done everything he could to heat up the animus between the Catholic Church and Hollywood’s Jewish moguls. In a letter to Father Wilfrid Parsons (the editor of
America
), he called the studios’ Jewish leadership “probably, the scum of the earth.” When Breen became the head of the newly formed Production Code Administration office, he set out to give the code teeth. He succeeded. The innuendo-laden adult humor audiences had enjoyed in movies like
Red Dust
and
Bombshell
would now have to be camouflaged or abandoned.

Before the studios began to feel Breen’s bite, Fleming had already started preparing his adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s beloved 1883 adventure about the plucky lad Jim Hawkins, the murderous one-legged rascal Long John Silver, and their search for buried treasure on a tropic isle in the eighteenth century. Luckily for Fleming, it was family fare, but with a violent, sometimes terrifying edge that would grow ever rarer in studio pictures after the growth spurt of the Production Code.
Treasure Island
had been filmed at least twice in the silent era, but not even Maurice Tourneur’s 1920 version, with Lon Chaney in two roles (including the blind pirate Pew), achieved the pop-cultural penetration of, say, Fairbanks’s
Three Musketeers
or
Robin Hood.
With this hale and hearty blockbuster, Fleming would succeed where the gifted Tourneur had failed.

In the spring of 1934, Fleming and his producing partner, Stromberg (who would get a full producer’s credit on-screen for
Treasure Island—
an uncommon occurrence for a Fleming picture), knew they had the opportunity to craft a fresh image of a children’s classic.
According
to Jackie Cooper, who played Jim Hawkins, Fleming and Stromberg lobbied in vain to film in the South Seas instead of on Catalina Island (off the Southern California coast); to purchase a true oceangoing frigate; and to shoot in color, as Fairbanks did with his 1926 two-strip Technicolor hit,
The Black Pirate.
(Fairbanks’s technical supervisor on all matters piratical, Dwight Franklin, advised Fleming on buccaneering, too.) Mayer turned these requests down; Fleming threatened to walk.

“If Fleming didn’t do it, then Mr. Mayer was not happy with any other director,” Cooper recalled. So, while not giving in to Fleming’s demands, Mayer placed every in-house resource of an MGM super-production at his disposal. Studio publicity trumpeted “more than two years of preparatory work in the studio research department.” The production accumulated antiques, including “thirty-five genuine flintlock rifles,” and manufactured stunning facsimiles, such as “ten large cannon with a range of a mile each.” Crewmen paved mock-ups of eighteenth-century roads and walkways with several tons of cobblestones. In Oakland, California, MGM dressed the estuary wharf of the Alaska Packers Association to look like the Bristol docks. A private collector supplied Catalina with tropical birds. A second unit was sent to Hawaii (Maui, mostly) for additional boat shots and rowing shots.

For the
Hispaniola,
the three-masted, square-rigged sailing ship of Stevenson’s tale, MGM salvaged the hulk of the whaler
Nanuk,
which had survived the production of
Eskimo
(the film Fleming had encountered on vacation in Alaska), and erected period decks and masts on top of it. “If you dove in the water and swam down a few feet, you could see the other hull right underneath it,” Cooper said. “But it stayed afloat, this thing, and it sailed. Actually, underneath there were the motors moving it.” (Cooper insisted that the
Nanuk
was a yacht and that Joseph Schenck had lent it to Mayer.) Cooper ended up having to wear a wig, because he’d cut off his boyish bob when it looked as if the picture would fall through.

The most critical construction was the script. Leonard Praskins and the future leader of the Hollywood Ten, John Howard Lawson, each took a swing at it. To avoid what Stromberg called “the leisurely start of the story,” these scripts began with Captain Flint burying his loot at Treasure Island. The novel’s colorful, mysterious brigands—even Billy Bones, whose tumultuous residence at the Hawkins family’s Admiral Benbow Inn sets Stevenson’s tale in motion, and the menacing
blind
man Pew, who hands Billy the black spot that seals his doom—entered the tale as bold buccaneers rather than spooky enigmas. Early drafts depicted Long John Silver losing his leg and gaining a wooden stump in a mutiny. No wonder Stromberg recalled, “We began to feel we were leaving too little to the imagination. When Billy Bones arrived at the Inn, there was, for those who would see the picture, nothing mysterious about his character. He was mysterious to Jim Hawkins, perhaps, but
not
to the audience.”

Fleming eventually cut this material and made the Admiral Ben-bow Inn, once again, the story’s point of origin. To speed things up further, he eliminated the character of Hawkins’s father (after all, he begins wasting away just three pages into the narrative) and turned young Jim Hawkins into the man of the house and the sole protector of a pretty mother (Dorothy Peterson). With Fleming’s new favorite, Mahin, in charge of the script (he would receive sole credit), the moviemakers built suspense while balancing coziness and risk, picturesque action and grotesquerie. In the finished film, Jim is a lad we first see baking a cake for his mother’s birthday. Shortly afterward, he begins to serve as a trusted aide to the dissolute, apoplectic Billy Bones (Lionel Barrymore), who uses the Benbow Inn as a hideout. Without resorting to narration, Fleming and Mahin walk us right inside Jim Hawkins’s head. The movie’s Jim seems a few years younger than the book’s, but he has a large thirst for thrills. And with the age difference, his gullibility becomes more understandable, his perils more pronounced.