Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (37 page)

Fleming and the “It Girl,” Clara Bow, at the start of their affair, making
Mantrap
(1926).

Fleming and another lover, Bessie Love, on location for
A Son of His Father
(1925).

(above)
Samuel Goldwyn’s new discovery, Lili Damita, visits Fleming on the set of his Goldwyn-produced picture,
The Awakening
(1928).
(below)
Fleming with Ingrid Bergman at the New York City premiere of
Joan of Arc
(1948). Their affair was over, and he would be dead two months later.

Family portrait: Fleming, Vicky, Lu, and newborn Sally, 1937.

Fleming bought this 81-foot yacht from Frank Morgan to sail up and down the Pacific coast and kept Morgan’s name for it,
The Dolphin
.

The polio scare of 1946 prompted Fleming to purchase Knapp Island, near Vancouver, British Columbia, and to use this spacious house as a family retreat.

Douglas Fairbanks and Fleming were masters of pranks-manship. Here Fairbanks hangs off the roof of a caboose by hanging on to Fleming’s chest.

Fleming cleans the camera lens as John Emerson directs Arline Pretty and Fairbanks on
In Again, Out Again
(1917).

Fleming did his only on-screen acting when he directed Fairbanks and costarred with him in
Around the World in Eighty Minutes with Douglas Fairbanks
(1931). This photo was carefully posed to create the illusion that Fairbanks and Fleming were roughly the same height.

(above)
Fleming trains his eye on (
from left
) Ernest Torrence, Percy Marmont, and Clara Bow in
Mantrap
(1926), on a set in the Famous Players-Lasky Studios. James Wong Howe is at the camera.
(below)
Fleming (at the camera), John Emerson (with megaphone), and Douglas Fairbanks (on horse) shooting the comic western
Wild and Woolly
(1917).